Ondaatje Books Quotes & Sayings

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 think of rock 'n' roll as a combination of country blues and swing band music, not Chicago blues, and modern pop. — Bob Dylan

I had seen the Magic Shop from afar several times; I had passed it once or twice, a shop window of alluring little objects, magic balls, magic hens, wonderful cones, ventriloquist dolls, the material of the basket trick, packs of cards that looked all right, and all that sort of thing, but never had I thought of going in until one day, almost without warning, Gip hauled me by my finger right up to the window, and so conducted himself that there was nothing for it but to take him in. — H.G.Wells

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

Rather than being nonverbal, individuals with NLD generally present with abundant verbal ability, with many showing precocious language development and
high levels of vocabulary and general knowledge. — Maggie Mamen

Japan is not a Western democracy. The Japanese have kept their traditions, culture and heritage, but they have joined the community of free nations. — Natan Sharansky

Various books revolutionised what I think about novels and showed me that they're not strict, formulaic things. 'Coming Through Slaughter' by Michael Ondaatje was one of them. — Sarah Hall

When I ran for Congress I promised to help make health care affordable again. — Bobby Jindal

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.
I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. — Michael Ondaatje

American movies, English books - remember how they all end?" Gamini asked that night. "The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That's it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He's going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That's enough reality for the West. It's probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit. — Michael Ondaatje

"The Jews should not be allowed to keep what they have obtained from others by usury; it were best that they were compelled to worked so that they could earn their living instead of doing nothing but becoming avaricious." — Thomas Aquinas

So weird," Decker mumbled. "I thought she walked through walls.""I guess she doesn't have to. This is how she kept getting my porno stash last summer,"Beck
grumbled. "I had it behind lock and key.""Our porno stash. I told you to give it to Grandpa Louis. She leaves him alone. — Lizzy Ford

The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat. — Michael Ondaatje

Strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analysed, women ... merely adored. — Oscar Wilde

Many books open with an author's assurance of order. One slipped into their waters with a silent paddle ... But novels commenced with hesitation or chaos. Readers were never fully in balance. A door a lock a weir opened and they rushed through, one hand holding a gunnel, the other a hat. — Michael Ondaatje

The older I grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women. — Booker T. Washington

Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise. — Michael Ondaatje

I'm my own most merciless critic onstage. — Keith Jarrett

So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had
gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing
incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if
plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night. — Michael Ondaatje

For a long time I had wanted to take leave of Planet Tourism, to find one of those places that occasionally turn up in the middle pages of newspapers in far-flung cities, in which
we are told
a mad loner has been discovered who has lost all contact with the modern world. It seems inevitable that this desire will one day be listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association as Robinson Crusoe Syndrome. — Lawrence Osborne

I feel sure that the police are helping us more than I could do in ten years. They are making more anarchists than the most prominent people connected with the anarchist cause could make in ten years. If they will only continue I shall be very grateful; they will save me lots of work. — Emma Goldman

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

Miss Lasqueti consumed mostly crime thrillers, which constantly seemed to disappoint her. I suspect that for her the world was more accidental than any book's plot. Twice I saw her so irritated by a mystery that she half rose from the shadow of her chair and flung the paperback over the railing into the sea. — Michael Ondaatje

In cold weather states like Vermont, where the weather can get to 20 below zero, home heating assistance is critically important. In fact, it is a life and death issue. — Bernie Sanders

What is the point of all the money in the world if you don't have the freedom to do the things you love? — Anamika Mishra

Making an album is a long process, but it's a fun process. — Brett Eldredge

And it would be a spare life he would be certain to lead as a schoolteacher in some urban location. But he had a serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live. And this serenity and certainty I have seen only among those who have the armour of books close by. — Michael Ondaatje