Michael Ondaatje

A blind lover, don't knowwhat I love till I write it out

Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.

Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.

You think that you are an iconoclast, but you__e not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something, you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you.... I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.

I was a man fifteen years older than she, you understand. I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book.

He refused to believe in his own weaknesses, and with her he had not found a weakness to fit himself against.

Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.

I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.

But his own mind was helpless against every moment's headline. He did nothing but leap into the mass of changes and explore them and all the tiny facets so eventually he was completely governed by fears of certainty. He distrusted it in anyone but Nora for there it went to the spine, and yet he attacked it again and again in her, cruelly, hating it, the sure lanes of the probable. Breaking chairs and window glass doors in fury at her certain answers. [15-16]

There was a time when I could have slept with his friend Briffa, for instance. Around him the air was always fraught with possibilities.

There's water in my bonesa ghost of a chance

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.

In the morning she found pieces of a birdchopped and scattered by the fanblood sprayed onto the mosquito net,its body leaving paths on the wallslike red snails that drifted down in lumps.She could imagine the featherswhile she had sleptfalling around herlike slow rain.

I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me,will you. Stop defending yourself.

-I think you are inhuman. If I leave you, who will you go to? Would you find another lover?I said nothing.-Deny it,damn you!

How we are almost nothing. We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of the draw, with little choice or determination on our part.

...how many of us have a moved heart that shies away to a different angle, a millimetre or even less from the place where it first existed, some repositioning unknown to us.

This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.