Michael Ondaatje - Books Quotes

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I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books.... All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.

Michael Ondaatje
And it would be a spare life he would be certain to lead as a schoolteacher in some urban location. But he had a serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live. And this serenity and certainty I have seen only among those who have the armour of books close by.

Michael Ondaatje
Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.

Michael Ondaatje
The desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.

Michael Ondaatje
You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.

Michael Ondaatje
This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.

Michael Ondaatje
So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.

Michael Ondaatje