Michael Ondaatje Quotes
Collection of 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 embraceduring 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
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
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
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
...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 bonesa 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