You have to protect yourself from sadness. Sadness is very close to hate. Let me tell you this. This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone else's poison - thinking you can cure them by sharing it - you will instead store it within you. Those men in the desert were smarter than you. They assumed he could be useful. So they saved him, but when he was no longer useful they left him.
("The English Patient")
More Quotes from Michael Ondaatje:
I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.Michael Ondaatje
All I ever wanted was a world without maps.
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
Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.
Michael Ondaatje
When we are young we do not look into mirrors. It is when we are old, concerned with our name, our legend, what our lives will mean to the future. We become vain with the names we own, our claims to have been the first eyes, the strongest army, the cleverest merchant. It is when he is old that Narcissus wants a graven image of himself.
Michael Ondaatje
To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.
Michael Ondaatje
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