Michael Ondaatje Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

As always, books are mystical creatures to him. — Michael Ondaatje

What night gave Rafael was a formlessness in which everything had a purpose. As if darkness had a hidden musical language. — Michael Ondaatje

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

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

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

There are no brunettes ... among Florentine Madonnas. — Michael Ondaatje

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

Do you understand the sadness of geography? — Michael Ondaatje

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself. — Michael Ondaatje

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

So what was better for us all? An ignorance, or a cautiousness like his, towards our own hearts. — Michael Ondaatje

We are the real countries, not the boundaries drawn on maps with the names of powerful men. — Michael Ondaatje

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

In the desert you celebrate nothing but water. — Michael Ondaatje

Love is the use one makes of another. — Michael Ondaatje

Could you waste your life on a gift? If you did not use your gift, was it a betrayal? — Michael Ondaatje

The word should be thinkering. — Michael Ondaatje

I thought I was being loved because I was being altered. — Michael Ondaatje

Character, that subtle art, disappeared among them during those days and nights, existed only in a book or on a painted wall. — Michael Ondaatje

Those who had risked everything at a riverbend on a left turn and so discovered a fortune. — Michael Ondaatje

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. — Michael Ondaatje

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

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

In my work I sometimes borrow Claire's nature, as well as her careful focus on the world. — Michael Ondaatje

The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled. — Michael Ondaatje

First, he though, I need shoes with rubber on the bottom. I need gelato. — Michael Ondaatje

As a writer, one is busy with archaeology. — Michael Ondaatje

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

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

People don't write about kids; you have to give them a lot of freedom, and that causes anarchy and that causes farce. — Michael Ondaatje

We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them. — Michael Ondaatje

But when we are searching for an example of what we no longer have, we see it everywhere. — Michael Ondaatje

He had been slowing down, the way one, half asleep, continually rereads the same paragraph trying to find a connection between sentences. — Michael Ondaatje

Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence. — Michael Ondaatje

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

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

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

We keep wanting to save those who are forlorn in this world. It's a male habit. — Michael Ondaatje

I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries. — Michael Ondaatje

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

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

For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places. — Michael Ondaatje

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

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

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

A person will walk through a hundred doors to carry out the whims of the dead, not realizing he is burying himself away from the others. — Michael Ondaatje

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

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

There was a time when I could have slept with his friend Briffa, for instance. Around him the air was always fraught with possibilities. — Michael Ondaatje

Commissioner Harris at the far end stared along the mad pathway. This was his first child and it had already become a murderer. — Michael Ondaatje

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

To write about someone like myself would be very limiting. — Michael Ondaatje

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. — Michael Ondaatje

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

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. — Michael Ondaatje

Blood a necklace on me all my life. — Michael Ondaatje

Come. We must go deeper with no justice and no jokes. — Michael Ondaatje

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

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

-I think you are inhuman. If I leave you, who will you go to? Would you find another lover?
I said nothing.
-Deny it,damn you! — Michael Ondaatje

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

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

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

We are full of anarchy. We take our clothes off because we shouldn't take our clothes off. And we behave worse in other countries. — Michael Ondaatje

He refused to believe in his own weaknesses, and with her he had not found a weakness to fit himself against. — Michael Ondaatje

This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning. — Michael Ondaatje

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

The desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds. — Michael Ondaatje

As if this collection of things is what she is. So we fall in love with ghosts. — Michael Ondaatje

...the heart is an organ of fire. — Michael Ondaatje

Death means you are in the third person. — Michael Ondaatje

I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door. — Michael Ondaatje

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

Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous. — Michael Ondaatje

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

Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth. — Michael Ondaatje

There's water in my bones
a ghost of a chance — Michael Ondaatje

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

Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again. — Michael Ondaatje

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

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. — Michael Ondaatje

If I gave you my life, you would drop it wouldnt you? — Michael Ondaatje

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

all this Beethoven and rain — Michael Ondaatje

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. — Michael Ondaatje

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

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. — Michael Ondaatje

But we were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past. We sailed into the past. — Michael Ondaatje

I have to teach myself not to read too much into everything. It comes from too long having to read into hardly anything at all. — Michael Ondaatje

Sadness is very close to hate. — Michael Ondaatje