Michael Ondaatje Quotes
Githa Hariharan's fiction is wonderful-full of subtleties and humor and tenderness.
Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.
Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.
Her hand touched me at the wrist. "If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn't you?" I didn't say anything.
Politically I don't believe anymore that we can only have one voice to a story, it's like having one radio station to represent a country.
The one of the great sadnesses of any life is knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.
When I read biographies, I skip the first thirty pages about the childhood because it doesn't seem interesting to me.
If you look at Japanese film, it is made up of collage or bricolage, it is made up of lists, and suddenly when you stand back from the lists you begin to see the pattern of a life.
People don't write about kids; you have to give them a lot of freedom, and that causes anarchy and that causes farce.
Girls with poison necklacesto save themselves from torture.Just as women wear amuletswhich hold their rolled up fortunestranscribed on ola leaf.
She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water.
I can never understand someone by his strengths. Nothing is revealed there. I can only understand people by their weaknesses.
The Englishman left months ago, Hana, he's with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit.
Aliganaya - 'the embraceduring an intoxicated walk'or 'sudden arousalwhile driving over speed bumps
I once traveled with a guide who was taking me to Faya. He didn't speak for nine hours. At the end of it he pointed to the horizon and said, 'Faya!' That was a good day.
...how many of us have a moved heart that shies away to a different angle, a millimetre or even less from the place where it first existed, some repositioning unknown to us.
-I think you are inhuman. If I leave you, who will you go to? Would you find another lover?I said nothing.-Deny it, damn you!
I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me, will you. Stop defending yourself.
He refused to believe in his own weaknesses, and with her he had not found a weakness to fit himself against.
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.
Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.
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.
