Michael Ondaatje

“If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.”

“You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.”

“Women want everything of a lover. And too often I would sink below the surface. So armies disappear under sand. And there was her fear of her husband, her belief in her honour, my old desire for self-sufficiency, my disappearances, her suspicions of me, my disbelief that she loved me. The paranoia and claustrophobia of hidden love.”

“You have to protect yourself from sadness. Sadness is very close to hate. Let me tell you this. This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone else's poison – thinking you can cure them by sharing it – you will instead store it within you. Those men in the desert were smarter than you. They assumed he could be useful. So they saved him, but when he was no longer useful they left him.”

“As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.”

“As if this collection of things is what she is. So we fall in love with ghosts.”

“We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.”

“What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.”

“Meanwhile with the help of an anecdote I fell in love. Words caravaggio. They have a power.”

“Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.”

“Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet.”

“...record collection, with all those lifetimes and desires rhymed and distilled into two or three minutes of a song.”

“This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.”

“We are full of anarchy. We take our clothes off because we shouldn't take our clothes off. And we behave worse in other countries.”

“The trouble with words is that you can really talk yourself into a corner. You can't fuck yourself into a corner."That's a man talking," muttered Hana.”

“Nowadays he doesn't think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night.”

“The word should be thinkering.”

“There was no control except the "mood of his power... and it is for this reason it is good you never heard him play someplace where the weather for instance could change the next series of notes-- then you should never have heard him at all. He was never recorded. He stayed away while others moved into wax history, electronic history, those who said later that Boldon broke the path. It was just as important to watch him stretch and wheel around the last notes or to watch nerves jumping under the sweat of his head.”

“He will hear the rain before he feels it, a clicking on the dry grass, on the olive leaves.”

“... the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.”

“Death means you are in the third person.”

“I'll be looking at the moon, but I'll be seeing you.”

“He had been slowing down, the way one, half asleep, continually rereads the same paragraph trying to find a connection between sentences.”

“... in Asian gardens you could look at rock and imagine water, you could gaze at a still pool and believe it had the hardness of rock.”

“Give me a map and I'll build you a city.”

“In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover's name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence.”

“As we left they told us the old joke. "To start a journey in a sandstorm is good luck.”

“Every river they came to was bridge-less, as if its name had been erased, as if the sky were starless, homes doorless.”

“The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn't be.”

“Maybe this is the way to come out of a war, he thinks. A burned man to care for, some sheets to wash in a fountain, a room painted like a garden.”

“The noise of the trees, the breaking of moon into silver fish bouncing off the leaves of asters outside.”

“For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.”

“Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.”

“Tell me, is it possible to love someone who is not as smart as you are? ...But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? ...Why is that? Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.”

“How can she who had torn his heart open at the waterworks with her art lie now like a human in his arms? Or stand catatonic in front of bananas on Eastern Avenue deciding which bunch to buy? Does this make her more magical? As if a fabulous heron in flight has fallen dead at his feet and he sees the further wonder of its meticulous construction. How did someone conceive of putting this structure of bones and feathers together, deciding on the weight of beak and skull, and give it the ability to fly?”

“Blood a necklace on me all my life.”

“she had a laugh that hinted it had rolled around once or twice in the mud.”

“This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.”

“Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners. ”

“But there was a discipline, it was just that we didn't understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot - see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes. Listening to him was like talking to Coleman. You were both changing direction with every sentence, sometimes in the middle, using each other as a springboard through the dark. You were moving so fast it was unimportant to finish and clear everything. He would be describing something in 27 ways. There was pain and gentleness everything jammed into each number.”

“Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.”

“When we are young we do not look into mirrors. It is when we are old, concerned with our name, our legend, what our lives will mean to the future. We become vain with the names we own, our claims to have been the first eyes, the strongest army, the cleverest merchant. It is when he is old that Narcissus wants a graven image of himself.”

“For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.”

“Fathers die.You keep on loving them in any way you can.You can't hide him away in your heart.”

“ I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear....”

“I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you.Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying near me in the last year. I didn’t feel scared. Icertainly wasn’t brave just now. I thought to myself, We have this villa this grass, we should have laindown together, you in my arms, before we died. I wanted to touch that bone at your neck, collarbone,it’s like a small hard wing under your skin. I wanted to place my fingers against it. I’ve always liked fleshthe colour of rivers and rocks or like the brown eye of a Susan, do you know what that flower is? Haveyou seen them? I am so tired, Kip, I want to sleep. I want to sleep under this tree, put my eye againstyour collarbone I just want to close my eyes without thinking of others, want to find the crook of a treeand climb into it and sleep. What a careful mind! To know which wire to cut. How did you know? Youkept saying I don’t know I don’t know, but you did. Right? Don’t shake, you have to be a still bed forme, let me curl up as if you were a good grandfather I could hug, I love the word ‘curl,’ such a slowword, you can’t rush it...”

“Truth disappears with history and gossip tells us in the end nothing of personal relationships. There are stories of elopements, unrequited love, family feuds, and exhausting vendettas, which everyone was drawn into, had to be involved with. But nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other's presence. No one speaks of that exchange of gift and character - the way a person took on and recognized in himself he smile of a lover. Individuals are seen only in the context of these swirling social tides. It was almost impossible for a couple to do anything without rumour leaving their shoulders like a flock of messenger pigeons.Where is the intimate and truthful in all this? Teenager and Uncle. Husband and lover. A lost father in his solace. And why do I want to know of this privacy? After the cups of tea, coffee, public conversations...I want to sit down with someone and talk with utter directness, want to talk to all the lost history like that deserving lover.”

“All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.”

“Kirpal’s left hand swoops down and catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkle at the edge of his eyes behind his spectacles.”

“In my work I sometimes borrow Claire's nature, as well as her careful focus on the world.”