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In Canada Pianos Needed Water. You Opened Up The Back And Left A Full Glass Of Water, And A Month Later The Glass Would Be Empty. Her Father Had Told Her About The Dwarfs Who Drank Only At Pianos, Never In Bars.

-Michael Ondaatje

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In Canada Pianos Needed

Michael Ondaatje

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In Canada Pianos Needed Water. You Opened Up The Back And Left A Full Glass Of Water, And A Month Later The Glass Would Be Empty. Her Father Had Told Her About The Dwarfs Who Drank Only At Pianos, Never In Bars.

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She Had Always Wanted Words, She Loved Them; Grew Up On Them. Words Gave Her Clarity, Brought Reason, Shape.

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In Canada Pianos Needed Water. You Opened Up The Back And Left A Full Glass Of Water, And A Month Later The Glass Would Be Empty. Her Father Had Told Her About The Dwarfs Who Drank Only At Pianos, Never In Bars.

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So Many Nurses Had Turned Into Emotionally Disturbed Handmaidens Of The War, In Their Yellow-and-crimson Uniforms With Bone Buttons.

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I See The Poem Or The Novel Ending With An Open Door.

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Here. Where I Am Anonymous And Alone In A White Room With No History And No Parading. So I Can Make Something Unknown In The Shape Of This Room. Where I Am King Of Corners.

How Does This Happen? To Fall In Love And Be Disassembled.

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There Was Always, He Thought, This Pleasure Ahead Of Him, An Ace Of Joy Up His Sleeve So He Could Say You Can Do Anything To Me, Take Everything Away, Put Me In Prison, But I Will Know [her] When We Are Old.

I'll Be Looking At The Moon, But I'll Be Seeing You.

From This Point On, She Whispered, We Will Either Find Or Lose Our Souls.

She Had Grown Older. And He Loved Her More Now Than He Had Loved Her When He Understood Her Better, When She Was The Product Of Her Parents. What She Was Now Was What She Herself Had Decided To Become.

There's Always Been Anger In The Making Of Music Or Literature Or Dance.

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I Kind Of Was Shoveled Onto A Boat At 11 And Went To England. I Didn't Have Any Parent Watching Over Me. It Was Very Free And May Have Been A Bit Of A Scary Time For Me, But I Really Don't Remember Much About The Voyage Apart From Playing Ping-pong A Lot With A Couple Friends.

I Tend Not To Know What The Plot Is Or The Story Is Or Even The Theme. Those Things Come Later, For Me.

We All Have An Old Knot In The Heart We Wish To Untie.

Her Hand Touched Me At The Wrist. "if I Gave You My Life, You Would Drop It. Wouldn't You?" I Didn't Say Anything.

You Think That You Are An Iconoclast, But You’re 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.

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I Think Precision In Writing Goes Hand In Hand With Not Trying To Say Everything. You Try And Say Two-thirds, So The Reader Will Involve Himself Or Herself.

Every Night I Cut Out My Heart. But In The Morning It Was Full Again

There Always Should Be Something Hanging Unfinished Before A Scene Ends So That There's A Reason For Going To The Next Scene.

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Sometimes When She Is Able To Spend The Night With Him They Are Wakened By The Three Minarets Of The City Beginning Their Prayers Before Dawn. He Walks With Her Through The Indigo Markets That Lie Between South Cairo And Her Home. The Beautiful Songs Of Faith Enter The Air Like Arrows, One Minaret Answering Another, As If Passing On A Rumor Of The Two Of Them As They Walk Through The Cold Morning Air, The Smell Of Charcoal And Hemp Already Making The Air Profound. Sinners In A Holy City.

The Joyful Will Stoop With Sorrow, And When You Have Gone To The Earth I Will Let My Hair Grow Long For Your Sake, I Will Wander Through The Wilderness In The Skin Of A Lion

A Man In A Desert Can Hold Absence In His Cupped Hands, Knowing It Is Something That Feeds Him More Than Water.

Half A Page--and The Morning Is Already Ancient.

Meanwhile With The Help Of An Anecdote I Fell In Love. Words Caravaggio. They Have A Power.

This Last Night We Tear Into Each Other, As If To Wound, As If To Find The Key To Everything Before Morning.

So We Came To Understand That Small And Important Thing, That Our Lives Could Be Large With Interesting Strangers Who Would Pass Us Without Any Personal Involvement.

We Are Expanded By Tears, We Are Told, Not Reduced By Them.

Love Is The Use One Makes Of Another.

Snap. Lady With Dog. Lady On Sofa Half-naked. Snap. Naked Lady. Lady Next To Dresser. Lady At Window. Snap. Lady On Balcony Sunlight. (on New Orleans Photographer E. J. Bellocq)

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Do You Understand The Sadness Of Geography?

I Don't Have A Plan For A Story When I Sit Down To Write. I Would Get Quite Bored Carrying It Out.

We Own The Country We Grow Up In, Or We Are Aliens And Invaders.

Water Is The Exile, Carried Back In Cans And Flasks, The Ghost Between Your Hands And Your Mouth.

The First Sentence Of Every Novel Should Be: Trust Me, This Will Take Time But There Is Order Here, Very Faint, Very Human.

Over The Years, Confusing Fragments, Lost Corners Of Stories, Have A Clearer Meaning When Seen In A New Light, A Different Place.

Her Father Had Taught Her About Hands. About A Dog's Paws. Whenever Her Father Was Alone With A Dog In A House He Would Lean Over And Smell The Skin At The Base Of Its Paw. This, He Would Say, As If Coming Away From A Brandy Snifter, Is The Greatest Smell In The World! A Bouquet! Great Rumours Of Travel! She Would Pretend Disgust, But The Dog's Paw Was A Wonder: The Smell Of It Never Suggested Dirt. It's A Cathedral! Her Father Had Said, So-and-so's Garden, That Field Of Grasses, A Walk Through Cyclamen--a Concentration Of Hints Of All The Paths The Animal Had Taken During The Day.

That's One Of The Great Sadnesses Of Any Life - Knowing What You Know Now And Then Remembering What You Did Not Know Then.

All This Beethoven And Rain

What Is Interesting And Important Happens Mostly In Secret, In Places Where There Is No Power. Nothing Much Of Lasting Value Ever Happens At The Head Table, Held Together By A Familiar Rhetoric. Those Who Already Have Power Continue To Glide Along The Familiar Rut They Have Made For Themselves.

A Man In A Desert Can Hold Absence In His Cupped Hands Knowing It Is Something More Than Water. There Is A Plant Whose Heart, If One Cuts It Out Is Replaced With Fluid Containing Herbal Goodness. Every Morning One Can Drink The Liquid Amount Of The Missing Heart.

The Last Three Books Are Much More A Case Of A Moment Of History, What Happened Almost By Accident Or Coincidence, Like Being In The Same Elevator Or Lifeboat.

You're Getting Everyone's Point Of View At The Same Time, Which For Me, Is The Perfect State For A Novel: A Cubist State, The Cubist Novel.

...sometimes We Enter Art To Hide Within It. It Is Where We Can Go To Save Ourselves, Where A Third-person Voice Protects Us.

... The Desert, Where There Is The Communal Book Of Moonlight. We Were Among The Rumour Of Wells. In The Palace Of Winds.

All I Desired Was To Walk Upon Such An Earth That Had No Maps.

If She Were A Writer She Would Collect Her Pencils And Notebooks And Favourite Cat And Write In Bed. Strangers And Lovers Would Never Get Past The Locked Door.

Come. We Must Go Deeper With No Justice And No Jokes.

You Don't Want To Write Your Own Opinion, You Don't Want To Just Represent Yourself, But Represent Yourself Through Someone Else.

A Writer Uses A Pen Instead Of A Scalpel Or Blow Torch.

When I Began To Write Novels, I Wanted To Keep That Element Of Interaction With The Reader That Exists In Poetry, Not Just For The Reader To Be Shepherded From A To B To C To D But To Participate, And The Less You Say Sometimes, The Better It Is. You Know, It's The Way When Someone Speaks Very Quietly, You Move Forward So You Can Listen More Carefully.

Sleep Is A Prison For A Boy Who Has Friends To Meet.

There Is The Hidden Presence Of Others In Us, Even Those We Have Known Briefly. We Contain Them For The Rest Of Our Lives, At Every Border That We Cross.

I Want The Marginality To Come Into The Center. This Is The Thing I Was Conscious Of Growing Up, When I Later Lived In England. I Saw All These War Movies That Came Out Shortly After The War, And They Were All About The War Being Fought By Englishmen Or Americans, There Were No Other "allies" In It - From India Or Australia, Etc.

She Moved From Being A Young Woman Into Having The Angular Look Of A Queen, Someone Who Has Made Her Face With Her Desire To Be A Certain Kind Of Person. He Still Likes That About Her. Her Smartness, The Fact That She Did Not Inherit That Look Or That Beauty, But It Was Something Searched For And That It Will Always Reflect A Present Stage Of Her Character.

Nicholas Temelcoff Is Famous On The Bridge, A Daredevil. He Is Given All The Difficult Jobs And He Takes Them. He Descends Into The Air With No Fear. He Is A Solitary. He Assembles Ropes, Brushes The Tackle And Pulley At His Waist, And Falls Off The Bridge Like A Diver Over The Edge Of A Boat.

She Lights A Match In The Dark Hall And Moves It Onto The Wick Of The Candle. Light Lifts Itself Onto Her Shoulders. She Is On Her Knees. She Puts Her Hands On Her Thighs And Breathes In The Smell Of The Sulphur. She Imagines She Slap Breathes In Light.

I Often Need A Limited Space. It's Like Having A House To Roam Around In And Reinvent And Have Things To Happen In, Kind Of Like A French Farce. Doors Opening, Doors Closing, New People Arriving, And Disappearing, And So Forth.

As A Writer, One Is Busy With Archaeology.

We Keep Wanting To Save Those Who Are Forlorn In This World. It’s A Male Habit.

Every Immigrant Family, It Seems, Has Someone Who Does Not Belong In The New Country They Have Come To. It Feels Like Permanent Exile To That One Brother Or Wife Who Cannot Stand A Silent Fate In Boston Or London Or Melbourne. I’ve Met Many Who Remain Haunted By The Persistent Ghost Of An Earlier Place.

All I Ever Wanted Was A World Without Maps.

She Is A Woman Of Honour And Smartness Whose Wild Leaves Out Luck, Always Taking Risks, And There Is Something In Her Brow Now, That Only She Can Recognize In A Mirror. Ideal And Idealistic In That Shiny Dark Hair! People Fall In Love With Her. She Is A Woman I Don’t Know Well Enough To Hold In My Wing, If Writers Have Wings, To Harbour For The Rest Of My Life.

Falling In Love

I Love The Performance Of A Craft, Whether It Is Modest Or Mean-spirited, Yet I Walk Away When Discussions Of It Begin - As If One Should Ask A Gravedigger What Brand Of Shovel He Uses Or Whether He Prefers To Work At Noon Or In Moonlight. I Am Interested Only In The Care Taken, And Those Secret Rehearsals Behind It. Even If I Do Not Understand Fully What Is Taking Place.

It's An Odd State To Be In, Blowing The Whistle On Your Home Country.

But We Were Interested In How Our Lives Could Mean Something To The Past. We Sailed Into The Past.

She Entered The Story Knowing She Would Emerge From It Feeling She Had Been Immersed In The Lives Of Others, In Plots That Stretched Back Twenty Years, Her Body Full Of Sentences And Moments, As If Awaking From Sleep With A Heaviness Caused By Unremembered Dreams.

There's A Lot Of Thievery Involved In Writing. You're Breaking Into Other People's Spaces And Other People's Stories.

What Began It All Was The Bright Bone Of A Dream I Could Hardly Hold Onto.

Most Of The Time In Our World, Truth Is Just Opinion.

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Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Monica Lewinsky

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