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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.

-Michael Ondaatje

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Sometimes When She Is

Michael Ondaatje

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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.

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I See Myself As Someone Who's Been Saved By Writing. God Knows What I Would Have Been, Become Or How I Would Have Ended Up Without It.

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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.

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

I Want To Die On Your Chest But Not Yet She Wrote Sometime In The 13th Century Of Our Love

Fathers Die.you Keep On Loving Them In Any Way You Can.you Can't Hide Him Away In Your Heart.

In The Desert You Celebrate Nothing But Water.

When Someone Speaks He Looks At A Mouth, Not Eyes And Their Colors, Which, It Seems To Him, Will Always Alter Depending On The Light Of A Room, The Minute Of The Day. Mouths Reveal Insecurity Or Smugness Or Any Other Point On The Spectrum Of Character. For Him They Are The Most Intricate Aspect Of Faces. He's Never Sure What An Eye Reveals. But He Can Read How Mouths Darken Into Callousness, Suggest Tenderness. One Can Often Misjudge An Eye From Its Reaction To A Simple Beam Of Sunlight.

He Came To This Country Like A Torch On Fire And He Swallowed Air As He Walked Forward And He Gave Out Light

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

He Will Hear The Rain Before He Feels It, A Clicking On The Dry Grass, On The Olive Leaves.

Death Means You Are In The Third Person.

Some People You Just Had To Embrace, In Some Way Or Another, Had To Bite Into The Muscle, To Remain Sane In Their Company. You Needed To Grab Their Hair And Clutch It Like A Drowner So They Would Pull You Into Their Midst. Otherwise They, Walking Casually Down The Street Towards You, Almost About To Wave, Would Leap Over A Wall And Be Gone For Months.

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