Michael Ondaatje · 156 pages
Rating: (4.8K votes)
“This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Coming Through Slaughter
“But there was a discipline, it was just that we didn't understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot - see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes. Listening to him was like talking to Coleman. You were both changing direction with every sentence, sometimes in the middle, using each other as a springboard through the dark. You were moving so fast it was unimportant to finish and clear everything. He would be describing something in 27 ways. There was pain and gentleness everything jammed into each number.”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Coming Through Slaughter
“The right ending is an open door you can't see too far out of. It can mean exactly the opposite of what you are thinking.”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Coming Through Slaughter
“There was no control except the "mood of his power... and it is for this reason it is good you never heard him play someplace where the weather for instance could change the next series of notes-- then you should never have heard him at all. He was never recorded. He stayed away while others moved into wax history, electronic history, those who said later that Boldon broke the path. It was just as important to watch him stretch and wheel around the last notes or to watch nerves jumping under the sweat of his head.”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Coming Through Slaughter
“as if he were trying to escape the smell of her words as if the air from her talking came into his mouth and filled it puffed it up with poison so the brain was put to sleep and he could do nothing with it only react in his flesh.”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Coming Through Slaughter
“It was a music that had so little wisdom you wanted to clean nearly every note he passed, passed it seemed along the way as if travelling in a car, passed before he even approached it and saw it properly. There was no control except the mood of his power … and it is for this reason it is good you never heard him play on recordings. If you never heard him play some place where the weather for instance could change the next series of notes—then you should never have heard him at all. He was never recorded.”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Coming Through Slaughter
“But his own mind was helpless against every moment's headline. He did nothing but leap into the mass of changes and explore them and all the tiny facets so eventually he was completely governed by fears of certainty. He distrusted it in anyone but Nora for there it went to the spine, and yet he attacked it again and again in her, cruelly, hating it, the sure lanes of the probable. Breaking chairs and window glass doors in fury at her certain answers. [15-16]”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Coming Through Slaughter
“Once they were sitting at the kitchen table opposite each other. To his right and to her left was a window. Furious at something he drew his right hand across his body and lashed out. Half way there at full speed he realized it was a window he would be hitting and breaked. For a fraction of a second hid open palm touched the glass, beginning simultaneously to draw back. The window scarred and crumpled slowly two floors down. His hand miraculously uncut. It had acted exactly like a whip violating the target and still free, retreating from the outline of a star. She was delighted by the performance. Surprised he examined his fingers. [p.16]”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Coming Through Slaughter
“Always listening, listening to the wet fluid speech with no order, unfinished stories, badly told jokes that he sober as a spider perfected in silence.”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Coming Through Slaughter
“But there was a discipline, it was just that we didn’t understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot—see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes.”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Coming Through Slaughter
Michael Ondaatje
Born place: in Colombo, Sri Lanka
Born date September 12, 1943
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“With these words there came the rending scream of a shattered stirk and an angry troubling of the branches as the poor madman percolated through the sieve of a sharp yew, a wailing black meteor hurtling through green clouds, a human prickles.”
― Flann O'Brien, quote from At Swim-Two-Birds
“School was more than academics; an education prepared you for the humdrum of real life: working with others, tempering one's personality to assimilate with the group but without losing your individual identity, understading the factors of logic, reasoning, and debate. For a person - vampire or human - to succeed in the world, unlocking the mysteries of the universe was insufficient. One would also need to grasp the mysteries of human nature.”
― Melissa de la Cruz, quote from The Van Alen Legacy
“Our men think earning money and ordering around others is where power lies. They don't think power is in the hands of the woman who takes care of everyone all day long, and gives birth to their children.”
― Malala Yousafzai, quote from I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban
“We are the bourgeoisie—the third estate, as they call us now—and what we want is a nobility of merit, nothing more. We don't recognize this lazy nobility we now have, we reject our present class hierarchy. We want all men to be free and equal, for no one to be someone else's subject, but for all to be subject to the law. There should be an end of privileges and arbitrary power. Everyone should be treated equally as a child of the state, and just as there are no longer any middlemen between the layman and his God, so each citizen should stand in direct relation to the state. We want freedom of the press, of employment, of commerce. We want all men to compete without any special privileges, and the only crown should be the crown of merit.”
― Thomas Mann, quote from Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family
“theoretician, his reputation secured in probability-density functions”
― Michael Crichton, quote from Sphere
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Meant to Be
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