Michael Ondaatje Quotes & Sayings

But what did we really know, even of one another? We never thought of a future. Our small solar system - what was it heading towards? And how long would each of us mean something to the others? — Michael Ondaatje

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. — Michael Ondaatje

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

There is so much to know and we can only guess. Guess around him. To know him from these stray actions I am told about by those who loved him. And yet, he is still one of those books we long to read whose pages remain uncut. We are still unwise. It is not that he became too complicated but that he had reduced himself to a few things around him and he gave them immense meaning and significance. — 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 often need a limited space. It's like having a house to roam around in and reinvent and have things to happen in, kind of like a French farce. Doors opening, doors closing, new people arriving, and disappearing, and so forth. — Michael Ondaatje

Now where does he sit as he thinks of her? These years later. A stone of history skipping over the water, bouncing up so she and he have aged before it touches the surface again and sinks. — 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

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

I come from Divisadero Street. Divisadero, from the Spanish word for 'division,' the street that at one time was the dividing line between San Francisco and the fields of the Presidio. Or it might be derived from the word divisar, meaning 'to gaze at something from a distance.' (There is a 'height' nearby called El Divisadero.) Thus a point from which you can look far into the distance — Michael Ondaatje

In spite of her desire for a contained universe, her life felt scattered, full of many small moments, without great purpose. That is what she thought, though what is most untrustworthy about our natures and self-worth is how we differe in our own realities from the way we are seen by others. — Michael Ondaatje

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

The scale of the laying of mines in Italy and in North Africa cannot be imagined. At the Kismaayo-Afmadu road junction, 260 mines were found. There were 300 at the Omo River Bridge area. On June 30, 1941, South African sappers laid 2,700 Mark 11 mines in Mersa Matruh in one day. Four months later the British cleared Mersa Matruh of 7,806 mines and placed them elsewhere. — Michael Ondaatje

Her face became tougher and leaner, the face Cara-vaggio would meet later. She was thin, mostly from tiredness. She was always hungry and found it a furious exhaustion to feed a patient who couldn't eat or didn't want to, watching the bread crumble away, the soup cool, which she desired to swallow fast. She wanted nothing exotic, just bread, meat. — Michael Ondaatje

I know the devices of a demon. I was taught as a child about the demon lover. I was told about a beautiful temptress who came to a young man's room. And he, if he were wise, would demand that she turn around, because demons and witches have no back, only what they wish to present to you. — 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

That's Anil's path. She grows up in Sri Lanka, goes and gets educated abroad, and through fate or chance gets brought back by the Human Rights Commission to investigate war crimes. — Michael Ondaatje

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

For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell. — Michael Ondaatje

You built your walls too, she tells him. So I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he cannot stand. She with her beautiful clothes with her pale face that laughs at everyone who smiles at her ... — Michael Ondaatje

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

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

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

If you do not plunder the past, the absence feeds on you — Michael Ondaatje

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

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

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

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

The jackal with one eye that looks back and one that regards the path you consider taking. In his jaws are pieces of the past he delivers to you, and when all of that time is fully discovered it will prove to have been already known. — Michael Ondaatje

She moved from being a young woman into having the angular look of a queen, someone who has made her face with her desire to be a certain kind of person. He still likes that about her. Her smartness, the fact that she did not inherit that look or that beauty, but it was something searched for and that it will always reflect a present stage of her character. — Michael Ondaatje

How many of us have a moved heart that shies away to a different angle, a millimetre or even less from the place where it first existed, some repositioning unknown to us. — Michael Ondaatje

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

There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross. — Michael Ondaatje

Half a page
and the morning is already ancient. — Michael Ondaatje

But there was a discipline, it was just that we didn't understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot - see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes. Listening to him was like talking to Coleman. You were both changing direction with every sentence, sometimes in the middle, using each other as a springboard through the dark. You were moving so fast it was unimportant to finish and clear everything. He would be describing something in 27 ways. There was pain and gentleness everything jammed into each number. — Michael Ondaatje

Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy — Michael Ondaatje

He had approached the villa on that night of the storm not out of curiosity about the music but because of a danger to the piano player. The retreating army often left pencil mines within musical instruments. Returning owners opened up pianos and lost their hands. — Michael Ondaatje

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. — Michael Ondaatje

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

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

Nicholas Temelcoff is famous on the bridge, a daredevil. He is given all the difficult jobs and he takes them. He descends into the air with no fear. He is a solitary. He assembles ropes, brushes the tackle and pulley at his waist, and falls off the bridge like a diver over the edge of a boat. — Michael Ondaatje

In the morning she found pieces of a bird
chopped and scattered by the fan
blood sprayed onto the mosquito net,
its body leaving paths on the walls
like red snails that drifted down in lumps.
She could imagine the feathers
while she had slept
falling around her
like slow rain. — Michael Ondaatje

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

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

I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation. — Michael Ondaatje

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

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

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

A well-told lie is worth a thousand facts — Michael Ondaatje

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

And he loved my mother. I saw him on the last days of his life lift that oil-scented right hand and enter its fingers into her ordered hair and rustle it free of its pins as if he had been offered velvet or the fur of a rare animal. Forever I hold that gesture. For me it was perhaps the last remembered pleasure belonging to him. It is the unspoiled core of whatever I know of love and family (and I have not been successful at the craft of it). Our shyness at embracing each other - it rarely happened - did not matter. I felt safe and comforted in his house. — Michael Ondaatje

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She swabbed arms that kept bleeding. She removed so many pieces of shrapnel she felt she'd transported a ton of metal out of the huge body of the human that she was caring for while the army travelled north. — Michael Ondaatje

Do you understand the sadness of geography? — Michael Ondaatje

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

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. — Michael Ondaatje

As if he were trying to escape the smell of her words as if the air from her talking came into his mouth and filled it puffed it up with poison so the brain was put to sleep and he could do nothing with it only react in his flesh. — Michael Ondaatje

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

I have been seeing dragons again.
Last night, hunched on a beaver dam,
one held a body like a badly held cocktail;
his tail, keeping the beat of a waltz,
sent a morse of ripples to my canoe.
They are not richly bright
but muted like dawns
or the vague sheen on a fly's wing.
Their old flesh drags in folds
as they drop into grey pools,
strain behind a tree.
Finally the others saw one today, trapped,
tangled in our badminton net.
The minute eyes shuddered deep in the creased face
while his throat, strangely fierce, stretched
to release an extinct burning inside:
pathetic loud whispers as four of us
and the excited spaniel surrounded him. — 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

How can she who had torn his heart open at the waterworks with her art lie now like a human in his arms? Or stand catatonic in front of bananas on Eastern Avenue deciding which bunch to buy? Does this make her more magical? As if a fabulous heron in flight has fallen dead at his feet and he sees the further wonder of its meticulous construction. How did someone conceive of putting this structure of bones and feathers together, deciding on the weight of beak and skull, and give it the ability to fly? — Michael Ondaatje

For the first forty days a child
is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths,
a hundred small lessons
and then the past is erased. — Michael Ondaatje

There was no control except the mood of his power ... and it is for this reason it is good you never heard him play someplace where the weather for instance could change the next series of notes
then you should never have heard him at all. He was never recorded. He stayed away while others moved into wax history, electronic history, those who said later that Boldon broke the path. It was just as important to watch him stretch and wheel around the last notes or to watch nerves jumping under the sweat of his head. — Michael Ondaatje

The trouble with words is that you can really talk yourself into a corner. You can't fuck yourself into a corner.
"That's a man talking," muttered Hana. — 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

To rest was to receive all aspects of the world without judgment. A bath in the sea, a fuck with a soldier who never knew your name. Tenderness toward the unknown and anonymous, which was tenderness to the self. — Michael Ondaatje

But the young sapper was already on his back, the rifle aimed, his eye almost brushing the beards of Noah and Abraham and the variety of demons until he reached the great face and was stilled by it, the face like a spear, wise, unforgiving. — 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

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

Small talk plunged to its death around him. — Michael Ondaatje

I kind of was shoveled onto a boat at 11 and went to England. I didn't have any parent watching over me. It was very free and may have been a bit of a scary time for me, but I really don't remember much about the voyage apart from playing ping-pong a lot with a couple friends. — 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

How we are almost nothing. We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of the draw, with little choice or determination on our part. — Michael Ondaatje

You know it is the most relaxed thing when you when you sit with a best friend and you know there is nothing you have to tell him to empty your mind. We just stayed there together, silent in the dusk like this, and we were quite happy. — Michael Ondaatje

You think that you are an iconoclast, but you're not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something, you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you ... I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character. — Michael Ondaatje

A novel is a mirror walking down a road — Michael Ondaatje

Don't we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it. — Michael Ondaatje

How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled. — Michael Ondaatje

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

If he could walk across the room and touch her he would be sane. But between them lay a treacherous and complex journey. It was a very wide world. — Michael Ondaatje

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

Every immigrant family, it seems, has someone who does not belong in the new country they have come to. It feels like permanent exile to that one brother or wife who cannot stand a silent fate in Boston or London or Melbourne. I've met many who remain haunted by the persistent ghost of an earlier place. — Michael Ondaatje

Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity. — Michael Ondaatje

If he closes his eyes he sees the streets of Asia full of fire. It rolls across cities like a burst map, the hurricane of heat withering bodies as it meets them, the shadow of humans suddenly in the air. This tremor of Western wisdom. — Michael Ondaatje

Secrets turn powerless in the open air. — Michael Ondaatje

She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he had loved her when he understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become. — Michael Ondaatje

Girls with poison necklaces
to save themselves from torture.
Just as women wear amulets
which hold their rolled up fortunes
transcribed on ola leaf. — Michael Ondaatje

During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed. So our job becomes to keep peace with enemy camps, eliminate the chaos at the end of Jacobean tragedies, and with 'the mercy of distance' write the histories. — Michael Ondaatje

He turns his back to the far shore and rows toward it. He can in this way travel away from, yet still see, his house ... he feels he is riding a floating skeleton ... Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible. — 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