Ondaatje Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Ondaatje

Ondaatje Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Ondaatje quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

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