Quotes by Michael Ondaatje

Could you fall in love with her if she wasn't smarter than you?  I mean, she may not be smarter than you.  But isn't it important for you to think that she is smarter than you?... You see, I think that it is easier to fall in love with him than you.  Why is that?  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.

What he would say he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world.