Anil's Ghost Quotes

“ I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear....”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

“American movies, English books - remember how they all end?" Gamini asked that night. "The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That's it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He's going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That's enough reality for the West. It's probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

“Jung was absolutely right about one thing. We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

“For when people leave our company in our time we are never certain of seeing them again, or seeing them unaltered.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

“Secrets turn powerless in the open air.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

“The important thing is to be able to live in a place or a situation where you must use your sixth sense all the time.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

“I can never understand someone by his strengths. Nothing is revealed there. I can only understand people by their weaknesses.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

“A person will walk through a hundred doors to carry out the whims of the dead, not realizing he is burying himself away from the others.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

“There were nights when Cullis would lie beside her, barely touching her with the tip of his finger. He would move down the bed, kissing her brown hip, her hair, to the cave within her. When they were apart he wrote how he loved the sound of her breath in those moments, the intake and release of it, paced and constant, as if preparing, as if knowing there was to be long distance ahead. His hands on her thighs, his face wet with the taste of her, her open palm on the back of his neck.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

“I don't think clarity is necessarily truth. It's simplicity, isn't it?”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

“At night, returning from work, Anil would slip out of her sandals and stand in the shallow water, her toes among the white petals, her arms folded as she undressed the day, removing layers of events and incidents so they would no longer be within her. She would stand there for a while, then walk wet-footed to bed.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

“You're an archaeologist. Truth comes finally into the light. It's in the bones and sediment.

It's in character and nuance and mood.

That is what governs us in our lives, that's not the truth.

For the living it is the truth.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

“We need parents when we’re old too.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

“paranoid is someone with all the facts, the joke went.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

“What is that quality in us? Do you think? That makes us cause our own rain and smoke?”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

“The way the terrorists in our time can be made to believe they are eternal if they die for the cause of their ruler.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

“We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

“When we are young, he thought, the first necessary rule is to stop invasions of ourselves. We know this as children.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

“In nearly every house, in nearly every family, there was knowledge of someone’s murder or abduction by one side or another”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

“Now it seemed to others he had choreographed the arc of his career in order to attempt this one trick on the world.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

“It was in Oklahoma, within a month of her arrival, that they established the Fuck Yorick School of Forensics. This was not just a principle of necessary levity but the name of their bowling team. Wherever she worked, first in Oklahoma, then in Arizona, her cohorts ended the evenings with beer in one hand, a cheese taco in the other, cheering or insulting teams and scuffing along the edges of the bowling alleys in their shoes from the planet Andromeda. She had loved the Southwest, missed being one of the boys, and was now light-years beyond the character she had been in London. They would go through a heavy day’s work load, then drive to the wild suburban bars and clubs on the outskirts of Tulsa or Norman, with Sam Cooke in their hearts. In the greenroom a list was tacked up of every bowling alley in Oklahoma with a liquor license. They ignored job offers that came from dry counties. They snuffed out death with music and craziness. The warnings of carpe diem were on gurneys in the hall. They heard the rhetoric of death over the intercom; ‘vaporization’ or ‘microfragmentation’ meant the customer in question had been blown to bits. They couldn’t miss death, it was in every texture and cell around them. No one changed the radio dial in a morgue without a glove on.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

“Even if you are a monk, like my brother, passion or slaughter will meet you someday. For you cannot survive as a monk if society does not exist. You renounce society, but to do so you must first be a part of if, learn your decision from it. This is the paradox of retreat. My brother entered temple life. He escaped the world and the world came after him. He was seventy when he was killed by someone, perhaps someone from the time when he was breaking free - for that is the difficult stage, when you leave the world.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

“...small talk plunged to its death around him.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost