Warlight Quotes

“You return to that earlier time armed with the present, and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“Mahler put the word schwer beside certain passages in his musical scores. Meaning “difficult.” “Heavy.” We were told this at some point by The Moth, as if it was a warning. He said we needed to prepare for such moments in order to deal with them efficiently, in case we suddenly had to take control of our wits. Those times exist for all of us, he kept saying. Just as no score relies on only one pitch or level of effort from musicians in the orchestra. Sometimes it relies on silence. It was a strange warning to be given, to accept that nothing was safe anymore. “ ‘Schwer,’ ” he’d say, with his fingers gesturing the inverted commas, and we’d mouth the word and then the translation, or simply nod in weary recognition. My sister and I got used to parroting the word back to each other—“schwer.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“Half the life of cities occurs at night,’ Olive Lawrence warned us. ‘There’s a more uncertain morality then”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“Your own story is just one, and perhaps not the important one. The self is not the principal thing.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“We are foolish as teenagers. We say wrong things, do not know how to be modest, or less shy. We judge easily. But the only hope given us, although only in retrospect, is that we change. We learn, we evolve. What I am now was formed by whatever happened to me then, not by what I have achieved, but by how I got here. But who did I hurt to get here? Who guided me to something better? Or accepted the few small things I was competent at? Who taught me to laugh as I lied? And who was it made me hesitate about what I had come to believe”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“I suppose we choose whatever life we feel safest in;”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“If a wound is great you cannot turn it into something that is spoken, it can barely be written.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“the lost sequence in a life, they say, is the thing we always search out”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“we order our lives with barely held stories”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“When you attempt a memoir, I am told, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you, and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually towards you. "A memoir is the lost inheritance," you realize, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected. If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of another. So I believed something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her small hall of mirrors and I in mine.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“Because what she wanted, I suspect, was a world she could fully participate in, even if it meant not being fully and safely loved.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“Do we eventually become what we are originally meant to be?”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“We find ourselves in a “collage” in which nothing has moved into the past and no wounds have healed with time, in which everything is present, open and bitter, in which everything coexists contiguously….”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“I was about to enter a borderless terrain between adolescence and adulthood”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“We order our lives with barely held stories. As if we have been lost in a confusing landscape, gathering what was invisible and unspoken—Rachel, the Wren, and I, a Stitch—sewing it all together in order to survive, incomplete, ignored like the sea pea on those mined beaches during the war. The greyhound is”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“Is this how we discover the truth, evolve? By gathering together such unconfirmed fragments?...Will all of them who have remained incomplete and lost to me become clear and evident when I look back?”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“Our heroes do not usually, after a certain age, teach or guide us anymore. They choose instead to protect the last territory where they find themselves. Adventurous thought is replaced with almost invisible needs. Those who once mocked the traditions they fought against with laughter now provide only the laughter, not the mockery.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“a person who, as the line went, would live in many places and die everywhere.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“Nothing lasts. Not even literary or artistic fame protects worldly things around us.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“A memoir is the lost inheritance.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“People are not who or where we think they are. And there is someone who watches from an unknown location”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“When Handel had his breakdown, he was, according to my opera-loving mother, “the ideal man” in that state, honourable, loving the world he could no longer be a part of, even if the world was a place of continual war.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“As he steps back, away from her into the darkness, she cries out, “How do you live?” And our hero, played by Paul Muni, says, “I steal.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“She was organized, ardently neat, whereas he was the rabbit's wild brother, leaving what looked like the path of an undressing hurricane wherever he went. He dropped his shoes, badger coat, cigarette ash, a dish towel, plant journals, trowels, on the floor behind him, left washed-off mud from potatoes in the sink. Whatever he came upon would be eaten, wrestled with, read, tossed away, the discarded becoming invisible to him. Whatever his wife said about this incorrigible flaw did no good. I suspect, in fact, she took pleasure in suffering his nature. Though give him credit, Mr. Malakite's fields were immaculate. No plant left its bed and wandered off as a 'volunteer'. He scrubbed the radishes under the thin stream of a hose. He spread his wares neatly on the trestle table at the Saturday market.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“Roman history, Nathaniel. You need to read it. It is full of emperors who cannot tell even their children what catastrophe is about to occur, so they might defend themselves. Sometimes there is a necessity for silence.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“Those maps always oppressive with faith, as if the only purpose in life was to journey from one church altar to another rather than cross the meticulous blue of a river to reach a distant friend.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“She must have perceived how one could darken and make invisible or at least distant what is unhappy or dangerous in a life; I think her eventual skill with limelight and fictional thunder allowed her to clarify for herself what was true and what was false, safe and unsafe.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“Who had chosen the line for her gravestone, “I have travel’d thro’ Perils & Darkness not unlike a Champion.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“I found her message heart-breaking in its cautiousness.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“If you grow up with uncertainty, you deal with people only on a daily basis, to be even safer on an hourly basis. You do not concern yourself with what you must or should remember about them. You are on your own.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight