“ 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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“The church was simply the former chapel of the castle, fronting upon its grass-grown court, which, however, was of generous enough width to have given up its quaintest corner to a little graveyard. Here the very headstones themselves seemed to sleep, as they slanted into the grass.”
― Henry James, quote from The American
“If anything happened to you, I'd be so destroyed they'd have to strap me to a bed and feed me through a tube. After five or six years, I might be capable of taking care of Rex. In the interim, you should assign a guardian.”
― Janet Evanovich, quote from Fearless Fourteen
“Here, you can read the letter. . . . See if you know what he wants. See if you know what I’m meant to do.” Angela didn’t reach out to take the ill-written pages on their lined paper. She sat with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands. There was a silence for a while. “I don’t need to read the letter. I know what he wants,” Angela said eventually. “He wants you to make the decisions. He wants you to take on the responsibility.” Clare was surprised. “Why?” “Because you’re not Chrissie, who wouldn’t know what day it was, and you’re not your mother who would cry her eyes out, and you’re not your father who would get into a temper and you’re not Ben and Jim who are too young to be taken into account. And because you’re bright and got a scholarship, that’s going to fit you and make you ready for any burden from now on.”
― Maeve Binchy, quote from Echoes
“I have never tried anything psychedelic, but I’ve always wanted to. Would I be wrapped up in colors, attacked by sounds, filled with insights about worlds I don’t even know exist?”
― quote from Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World
“The soldiers can come and do with us what they want. That makes papa feel weak, she says. He gets angry when he feels weak.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Krik? Krak!
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The Most Important 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.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
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