I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.
("The English Patient")
More Quotes from Michael Ondaatje:
She is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now, that only she can recognize in a mirror. Ideal and idealistic in that shiny dark hair! People fall in love with her. She is a woman I don't know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life.Michael Ondaatje
A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
Michael Ondaatje
In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind.
Michael Ondaatje
He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?
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
The desert could not be claimed or owned - it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East ... All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape.
Michael Ondaatje
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Based on Topics: Faces Quotes, Man Quotes, Sign & Symbol Quotes, Sin QuotesBased on Keywords: pre-occuopation
A Parliament is that to the Commonwealth which the soul is to the body. It behoves us therefore to keep the facility of that soul from distemper.
John Pym
If the public likes you, you're good.
Mickey Spillane
But every great scripture, whether Hebrew, Indian, Persian, or Chinese, apart from its religious value will be found to have some rare and special beauty of its own; and in this respect the original Bible stands very high as a monument of sublime poetry and of artistic prose.
Lafcadio Hearn