Michael Ondaatje Quotes

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.

Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.

You think that you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something, you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you.... I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.

I was a man fifteen years older than she, you understand. I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book.

He refused to believe in his own weaknesses, and with her he had not found a weakness to fit himself against.

I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.

But his own mind was helpless against every moment's headline. He did nothing but leap into the mass of changes and explore them and all the tiny facets so eventually he was completely governed by fears of certainty. He distrusted it in anyone but Nora for there it went to the spine, and yet he attacked it again and again in her, cruelly, hating it, the sure lanes of the probable. Breaking chairs and window glass doors in fury at her certain answers. [15-16]

There was a time when I could have slept with his friend Briffa, for instance. Around him the air was always fraught with possibilities.