## Metadata - Author: [[Michael Ondaatje]] - Full Title: Warlight - Category: #books ## Highlights - She always focused on the possibility of character. She weighed character, could discover it in a few grains of a person, even in one’s noncommittal silence. ([Location 688](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0755ZDRBH&location=688)) - When Olive Lawrence spoke it was more like a private shuffling of her thoughts, a soliloquy from somewhere in the shadows of her knowledge, an idea she was still unsure about. ([Location 691](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0755ZDRBH&location=691)) - Your own story is just one, and perhaps not the important one. The self is not the principal thing.” ([Location 704](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0755ZDRBH&location=704)) - “I’ll send you two a postcard,” Olive Lawrence said when she eventually left London. And then was gone from our lives. But somewhere on the borders of the Black Sea or at some small village post office near Alexandria, she would indeed mail us a platonic billet-doux about a cloud system in the mountains that suggested an alternative world, her other life. The postcards became our treasures, especially as we knew there was now no communication between her and The Darter. She’d journeyed out of his life without a backward glance. The idea of a woman mailing a postcard as part of a promise to two children far away indicated an expansiveness as well as aloneness, a hidden need in her. It signalled two very different states. Though perhaps not. What did that boy know…. There are moments after I’ve put down such thoughts about Olive Lawrence when I almost believe I am composing a possible version of my mother, while she was away, doing something I knew nothing about. Both these women were in unknown locations, though of course it was only Olive Lawrence who courteously and beyond the call of duty mailed postcards to us from wherever she was. And there is the third corner of the triangle these two women made up, which I also consider now. It is Rachel, who needed a close relationship with a mother during that time, to protect her in the way a mother could. She had walked between Olive and me that night up the slow incline of hill into Streatham woods, being told that when she was in the darkness with us there would be no danger, that there was no danger even in dreams or during the unstable tumult of her seizures. There were only crickets in song above us, only the scratch of a badger as it turned in comfort, only the hush and then a sudden whisper of the oncoming rain. ([Location 732](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0755ZDRBH&location=732)) - It was strange to consider their world being organized in such a godlike way by a woman who was remembering less and less of her own universe. ([Location 1468](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0755ZDRBH&location=1468)) - A minor anarchy was still in me. ([Location 1711](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0755ZDRBH&location=1711))