373 Quotes by Michael Ondaatje

As he steps back, away from her into the darkness, she cries out, “How do you live?” And our hero, played by Paul Muni, says, “I steal.

In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient’s mind.

We are foolish as teenagers. We say wrong things, do not know how to be modest, or less shy. We judge easily. But the only hope given us, although only in retrospect, is that we change. We learn, we evolve. What I am now was formed by whatever happened to me then, not by what I have achieved, but by how I got here.

Someone’s war was slashing apart his delicate tapestry of companions. I was Odysseus, I understood the shifting and temporary vetoes of war. But he was a man who made friends with difficulty. He was a man who knew two or three people in his life, and they had turned out now to be the enemy.

She swabbed arms that kept bleeding. She removed so many pieces of shrapnel she felt she’d transported a ton of metal out of the huge body of the human that she was caring for while the army travelled north.

Their bodies had met in perfumes, in sweat, frantic to get under that thin film with a tongue or a tooth, as if they each could grip character there and during love pull it right off the body of the other.

Love is so small it can tear itself through the eye of a needle.

Not that we are touched by such things as concern, even if false, when we are young. But now, in retrospect, I am touched.

He can think now only of objects. Something alive, just one small grey bird on a branch, will break his heart.