“ 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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“Aside from being terrifying, it was totally humiliating. Rose Tyler, Barbie doll.”
― Jacqueline Rayner, quote from Doctor Who: The Stone Rose
“Dearest dearest darling most important dearest darling Natalie-this is me talking, your own priceless own Natalie, and I just wanted to tell you one single small thing: you are the best, and they will know it someday, and someday no one will ever dare laugh again when you are near, and no one will dare even speak to you without bowing first. And they will be afraid of you. And all you have to do is wait, my darling, wait and it will come, I promise you. Because that’s the fair part of it—they have it now, and you have it later. Don’t worry, please, please don’t, because worrying might spoil it, because if you worry it might not come true.
Somewhere there is something waiting for you, and you can smile a little perhaps now when you are so unhappy, because how well we both know that you will be happy very very very very soon. Somewhere someone is waiting for you, and loves you, and thinks you are beautiful, and it will be so wonderful and so fine, and if you can be patient and wait and never never never never despair, because despair might spoil it, you will come there, someday, and the gates will open and you will pass through, and no one will be able to come in unless you let them, and no one can even see you. Someday, someone, somewhere. Natalie, please”
― Shirley Jackson, quote from Hangsaman
“No domestic dispute between Franny and David had inspired the removal of their wedding rings. She would take hers off at work when she was giving scalp massages. Once she thought she had lost the ring, but she found it in the treatment room on a candleholder David had made for her during a personal failure of a pottery class he had taken the year he lost his job. After she found her ring, she started leaving it at home.”
― Amelia Gray, quote from Threats
“Frankly, if you want to identify as a carrot, I will march in the Carrot Pride parade with you.”
― James Dawson, quote from This Book is Gay
“He talks of the life that will come from his own death, and he promises that life will flow to us in thousands of small ways as we die to our egos, our pride, our need to be right, our self-sufficiency, our rebellion, and our stubborn insistence that we deserve to get our way. When we cling with white knuckles to our sins and our hostility, we’re like a tree that won’t let its leaves go. There can’t be a spring if we’re still stuck in the fall. Lose your life and find it, he says. That’s how the world works.”
― Rob Bell, quote from Love Wins Low Price CD: Love Wins Low Price CD
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I, ZombieBookQuoters 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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