“ I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear....”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Anil's Ghost
“Jung was absolutely right about one thing. We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Anil's Ghost
“American movies, English books - remember how they all end?" Gamini asked that night. "The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That's it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He's going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That's enough reality for the West. It's probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Anil's Ghost
“For when people leave our company in our time we are never certain of seeing them again, or seeing them unaltered.”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Anil's Ghost
“Secrets turn powerless in the open air.”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Anil's Ghost
“The important thing is to be able to live in a place or a situation where you must use your sixth sense all the time.”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Anil's Ghost
“A person will walk through a hundred doors to carry out the whims of the dead, not realizing he is burying himself away from the others.”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Anil's Ghost
“At night, returning from work, Anil would slip out of her sandals and stand in the shallow water, her toes among the white petals, her arms folded as she undressed the day, removing layers of events and incidents so they would no longer be within her. She would stand there for a while, then walk wet-footed to bed.”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Anil's Ghost
“I don't think clarity is necessarily truth. It's simplicity, isn't it?”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Anil's Ghost
“You're an archaeologist. Truth comes finally into the light. It's in the bones and sediment.
It's in character and nuance and mood.
That is what governs us in our lives, that's not the truth.
For the living it is the truth.”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Anil's Ghost
“I can never understand someone by his strengths. Nothing is revealed there. I can only understand people by their weaknesses.”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Anil's Ghost
“Even if you are a monk, like my brother, passion or slaughter will meet you someday. For you cannot survive as a monk if society does not exist. You renounce society, but to do so you must first be a part of if, learn your decision from it. This is the paradox of retreat. My brother entered temple life. He escaped the world and the world came after him. He was seventy when he was killed by someone, perhaps someone from the time when he was breaking free - for that is the difficult stage, when you leave the world.”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Anil's Ghost
“...small talk plunged to its death around him.”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Anil's Ghost
Michael Ondaatje
Born place: in Colombo, Sri Lanka
Born date September 12, 1943
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“A startup is like a mosquito. A bear can absorb a hit and a crab is armored against one, but a mosquito is designed for one thing : to score. No energy is wasted on defense. The defense of mosquitos, as a species, is that there are a lot of them, but this is little consolation to the individual mosquito.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
“The life of a seamstress is no smaller than the life of a queen, the life of a child with Down syndrome no less filled with promise than the life of a philosopher, because the only significant measure of your life is the positive effect you have on others, either by conscious acts of will or by unconscious example.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog
“It is possible to insult Americans?”
“They are automatically insulted and enraged,” said the young composer. “They form splenetic organizations by the hundreds, and write letters to periodicals and congressmen. They gather in mobs and pay no attention. They hang people without trial and shoot citizens down with machine guns out of passing cars. They will despise you because you do not eat the same things they eat for breakfast. They even apply indifference.”
― Walter Van Tilburg Clark, quote from The City Of Trembling Leaves
“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.”
― D.H. Lawrence, quote from The Complete Poems (Poetry Library)
“For the people of my country," Renato said, "water is everything: love, life, religion... even God."
"It is like that for me too," I said. "In English we call that a metaphor."
"Of course," said Renato, "and water is the most abundant metaphor on earth.”
― Pam Houston, quote from Waltzing the Cat
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A Christmas Carol, T...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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