Michael Ondaatje Quotes

In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind.

I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.

What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.

Love is so small it can tear itself through the eye of a needle

She had a laugh that hinted it had rolled around once or twice in the mud.

Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.

Fathers die.You keep on loving them in any way you can.You can't hide him away in your heart.

we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives

I was a man fifteen years older than she, you understand. I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book.

Aliganaya - 'the embrace
during an intoxicated walk'
or 'sudden arousal
while driving over speed bumps

There are no brunettes ... among Florentine Madonnas.

As we left they told us the old joke. To start a journey in a sandstorm is good luck.

Do you understand the sadness of geography?

That's one of the great sadnesses of any life - knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.

I want to die on your chest but not yet she wrote sometime in the 13th century of our love

A novel is a mirror walking down a road

I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me,will you. Stop defending yourself.

Sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.

For when people leave our company in our time we are never certain of seeing them again, or seeing them unaltered.

The rulers of the country generally believed that betting eliminates strikes. Men had to work in order to gamble.

So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.

The right ending is an open door you can't see too far out of. It can mean exactly the opposite of what you are thinking.

He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?

Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.

It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.

In the desert you celebrate nothing but water.

Give me a map and I'll build you a city.

His conversations lost some of their syllables out of shyness.

Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again

I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.

Maybe this is the way to come out of a war, he thinks. A burned man to care for, some sheets to wash in a fountain, a room painted like a garden.

The important thing is to be able to live in a place or a situation where you must use your sixth sense all the time.

They broke the way a man dismantling a mine broke the second his geography exploded.

Every river they came to was bridge-less, as if its name had been erased, as if the sky were starless, homes doorless.

Small talk plunged to its death around him.

-What do you hate most? he asks.
-A lie. And you?
-Ownership, he says. When you leave me, forget me.

As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.

We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.

I'll be looking at the moon,
but I'll be seeing you.

I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear ...

The noise of the trees, the breaking of moon into silver fish bouncing off the leaves of asters outside.

Record collection, with all those lifetimes and desires rhymed and distilled into two or three minutes of a song.

We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.

Blood a necklace on me all my life.

What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto.

A woman should never learn to sew, and is she can she shouldn't admit to it

Sadness is very close to hate.

In Asian gardens you could look at rock and imagine water, you could gaze at a still pool and believe it had the hardness of rock.

all this Beethoven and rain

There is God only in the desert, he wanted to acknowledge that now. Outside of this there was just trade and power, money and war.

He came to this country like a torch on fire and he swallowed air as he walked forward and he gave out light

There's water in my bones
a ghost of a chance

When I read biographies, I skip the first thirty pages about the childhood because it doesn't seem interesting to me.

She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.

There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own.

A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.

Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.

From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.

There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.

When you're writing, it's as if you're within a kind of closed world.

It's an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country.

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.

There always should be something hanging unfinished before a scene ends so that there's a reason for going to the next scene.

Githa Hariharan's fiction is wonderful-full of subtleties and humor and tenderness.

The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn't be.

We have art,' Nietzsche said, 'so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.

Most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion.

Words are tricky things, a friend of his has told him, they're much more tricky than violins.

They had all grown older, but he still did not feel he had wisdom to go with his aging.

Mockery had gone too far during Hearts. There had been an attempt at strangulation and then her ear had been perforated by a fork.

In darkness, in any light after dusk, you can slit a vein and the blood is black.

Nothing will kill you, my friend. You are pure carbon.

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.

I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.

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.

I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.

Meanwhile with the help of an anecdote I fell in love. Words caravaggio. They have a power.

How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized

There's more danger in the violence you don't face.

The war is not over everywhere, she was told. The war is over. This war is over. The war here.

Reason was the only thing that might save them, and there was no reason.

A blind lover, don't know
what I love till I write it out

Secrets turn powerless in the open air.

A well-told lie is worth a thousand facts

He will hear the rain before he feels it, a clicking on the dry grass, on the olive leaves.

You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.

Who realizes how contented feral children are? The grasp of the family fell away as soon as I was out the door.

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.

Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.

In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover's name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence.

It was easy to fool the three of us (tween boys), who were naked with innocence.

But here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defence but to look for the truth in others.

You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.

This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

Jung was absolutely right about one thing. We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.

The Englishman left months ago, Hana, he's with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit.

And that would be unconscionable, I suppose, to feel any obligation? Yes. Of course it would.
Katherine cliffton
The English Patient

Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy

The deepest sorrow, he thought. Where the only way to survive is to excavate everything.