Don't we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it...There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language.
Michael OndaatjeRead
So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the emotional turmoil faced by nurses during wartime, highlighting their sacrifice and transformation into figures of distress.
Michael Ondaatje’s quote poignantly addresses the heavy emotional burden carried by nurses who serve in war zones. It suggests that the experience of war has deeply affected them, transforming their roles from caregivers into 'emotionally disturbed handmaidens,' indicating a loss of their former identity and the toll that conflict takes on those who provide care amidst chaos and suffering.
Themes
NursesWarEmotionsSacrificeIdentity
In practice
Example use cases
Use this quote in a speech about the emotional impacts of war on healthcare professionals.
More from Michael Ondaatje
All quotes →When we are young we do not look into mirrors. It is when we are old, concerned with our name, our legend, what our lives will mean to the future. We become vain with the names we own, our claims to have been the first eyes, the strongest army, the cleverest merchant. It is when he is old that Narcissus wants a graven image of himself.
Michael OndaatjeRead
Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.
Michael OndaatjeRead
You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.
Michael OndaatjeRead
You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
Michael OndaatjeRead
A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.
Michael OndaatjeRead
Similar quotes
He once told Allie and I that if he'd had to shoot anybody, he wouldn't've known which direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were.
J. D. SalingerRead
A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.
John Edward WilliamsRead
Having traveled to parts of the world where war has done its usual nasty work on people's lives, I have come to develop a particular hatred for the shape, the look, the sound of the AK-47.
Abigail DisneyRead
Until we go through it ourselves, until our people cower in the shelters of New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere while the buildings collapse overhead and burst into flames, and dead bodies hurtle about and, when it is over for the day or the night, emerge in the rubble to find some of their dear ones mangled, their homes gone, their hospitals, churches, schools demolished - only after that gruesome experience will we realize what we are inflicting on the people of Indochina.
William L. ShirerRead
These are they whose youth was violently severed by war and death; a word on the telephone, a scribbled line on paper, and their future ceased. They have built up their lives again, but their safety is not absolute, their fortress not impregnable.
Winifred HoltbyRead
We come across thirty or so hurried graves with makeshift wooden markers. 'Private Edwards, E.', a number, and that was all. Fourteen days ago he was alive, thinking feeling, hoping... If war was a game of cards, I'd say someone was cheating.
Spike MilliganRead