He will hear the rain before he feels it, a clicking on the dry grass, on the olive leaves.
Michael OndaatjeThat's one of the great sadnesses of any life - knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.
Michael OndaatjeWhat 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. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.
Michael Ondaatje