Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting. Michael Ondaatje More Quotes by Michael Ondaatje More Quotes From Michael Ondaatje In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind. Michael Ondaatje mind relationship book I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries. Michael Ondaatje sri-lanka home country So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons. Michael Ondaatje nurse yellow war 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. Michael Ondaatje daughter eye hands The rulers of the country generally believed that betting eliminates strikes. Men had to work in order to gamble. Michael Ondaatje gambling men country ...the heart is an organ of fire. Michael Ondaatje fire heart love The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat. Michael Ondaatje lasts three book It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself. Michael Ondaatje arguing character 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. Michael Ondaatje brave-new-world smart falling-in-love I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts. Michael Ondaatje ghost That's Anil's path. She grows up in Sri Lanka, goes and gets educated abroad, and through fate or chance gets brought back by the Human Rights Commission to investigate war crimes. Michael Ondaatje fate growing-up war There was always, he thought, this pleasure ahead of him, an ace of joy up his sleeve so he could say you can do anything to me, take everything away, put me in prison, but I will know [her] when we are old. Michael Ondaatje aces prison joy It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow. Michael Ondaatje reader responsibility stories I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure. Michael Ondaatje closure novel real I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out. Michael Ondaatje bored stories writing …Even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between land and chart, between distances and legends, between nature and storyteller. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage, and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it. Michael Ondaatje distance land book In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts. Michael Ondaatje sri-lanka lying facts We keep wanting to save those who are forlorn in this world. It’s a male habit. Michael Ondaatje males habit world Between the kitchen and the destroyed chapel a door led into an oval-shaped library. The space inside seemed safe except for a large hole at portrait level in the far wall, caused by mortar-shell attack on the villa two months earlier. The rest of the room had adapted itself to this wound, accepting the habits of weather, evening stars, the sound of birds. Michael Ondaatje wall stars doors She had lived in that house fourteen years, and every year she had demanded of John that she be given a pet of some strange exotic breed. Not that she did not have enough animals. She had collected several wild and broken animals that, in a way, had become exotic by their breaking. Their roof would have collapsed from the number of birds who might have lived there if the desert hadn't killed three- quarters of those that tried to cross it. Still every animal that came within a certain radius of that house was given a welcome-the tame, the half born, the wild, the wounded. Michael Ondaatje numbers animal years
