Ondaatje Quotes & Sayings

-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

He was a man who wrote, who interpreted the world. Wisdom grew out of being handed just the smallest sliver of emotion. A glance could lead to paragraphs of theory. — Michael Ondaatje

He can think now only of objects. Something alive, just one small grey bird on a branch, will break his heart. — Michael Ondaatje

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

A postcard. Neat handwriting fills the rectangle.
Half my days I cannot bear to touch you.
The rest of my time I feel like it doesn't matter if I will ever see you again. It isn't the morality, it's how much you can bear.
No date. No name attached. — Michael Ondaatje

Someone's war was slashing apart his delicate tapestry of companions. I was Odysseus, I understood the shifting and temporary vetoes of war. But he was a man who made friends with difficulty. He was a man who knew two or three people in his life, and they had turned out now to be the enemy. — Michael Ondaatje

In spite of this, our table's status on the Oronsay continued to be minimal, while those at the Captain's Table were constantly toasting to one another's significance. That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along in the familiar rut they have made for themselves. — Michael Ondaatje

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

The event that will light the way for immigration in North America is the talking picture. The silent film brings nothing but entertainment - a pie in the face, a fop being dragged by a bear out of a department store - all events governed by fate and timing, not language and argument. The tramp never changes the opinion of the policeman. The truncheon swings, the tramp scuttles through a corner window and disturbs the fat lady's ablutions. These comedies are nightmares. The audience emits horrified laughter as Chaplin, blindfolded, rollerskates near the edge of the unbalconied mezzanine. No one shouts to warn him. He cannot talk or listen. North America is still without language, gestures and work and bloodlines are the only currency. — Michael Ondaatje

Blood a necklace on me all my life. — 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

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

I promised to tell you how one falls in love. — Michael Ondaatje

Politically I also don't believe anymore that we can only have one voice to a story, it's like having one radio station to represent a country. You want the politics of any complicated situation to be complicated in a book of fiction or nonfiction. — Michael Ondaatje

A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water. There is a plant he knows of near El Taj, whose heart, if one cuts it out, is replaced with a fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can drink the liquid the amount of a missing heart. — 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

She had a laugh that hinted it had rolled around once or twice in the mud. — Michael Ondaatje

His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices. Patrick saw a wondrous night web-all of these fragments of a human order, something ungoverned by the family he was born into or the headlines of the day. A nun on a bridge, a dare-devil who was unable to sleep without drink, a boy watching a fire from his bed at night,an actress who ran away with a millionaire- the detritus and chaos of the age was realigned. — Michael Ondaatje

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

It was a music that had so little wisdom you wanted to clean nearly every note he passed, passed it seemed along the way as if travelling in a car, passed before he even approached it and saw it properly. There was no control except the mood of his power ... and it is for this reason it is good you never heard him play on recordings. If you never heard him play some place 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. — Michael Ondaatje

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town. — 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

What was wonderful was that even within the drunkenness of two a.m., each of you somehow recognized the more permanent worth and pleasure of the other. You may have arrived with others, will perhaps cohabit this night with others, but both of you have found your fates. — Michael Ondaatje

I knew maps of the sea floor, maps that depict weaknesses in the shield of the earth, charts painted on skin that contain the various routes of the Crusades. So — 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

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

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

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

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

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

A love story is not about those who lost their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing - not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past. — 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

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

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

You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones. — Michael Ondaatje

But here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defence but to look for the truth in others. — 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

There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You will find in this way the path of your life. — Michael Ondaatje

I am a man who did not enjoy poetry until I heard a woman recite it. And in that desert she dragged her university days into our minds to describe the stars. That night I fell in love with a voice. — Michael Ondaatje

Caravaggio was constantly diverted by the human element during burglaries. Breaking into a house during Christmas, he would become annoyed if the Advent calendar had not been opened up to the date to which it should have been. — Michael Ondaatje

You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else. — Michael Ondaatje

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

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

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

He never used words or reason. He just moved dangerously among us. — Michael Ondaatje

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

Reason was the only thing that might save them, and there was no reason. — 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

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

You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel. — 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

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

He will hear the rain before he feels it, a clicking on the dry grass, on the olive leaves. — Michael Ondaatje

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

But his own mind was helpless against every moment's headline. He did nothing but leap into the mass of changes and explore them and all the tiny facets so eventually he was completely governed by fears of certainty. He distrusted it in anyone but Nora for there it went to the spine, and yet he attacked it again and again in her, cruelly, hating it, the sure lanes of the probable. Breaking chairs and window glass doors in fury at her certain answers. [15-16] — Michael Ondaatje

Between the kitchen and the destroyed chapel a door led into an oval-shaped library. The space inside seemed safe except for a large hole at portrait level in the far wall, caused by mortar-shell attack on the villa two months earlier. The rest of the room had adapted itself to this wound, accepting the habits of weather, evening stars, the sound of birds. — Michael Ondaatje

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

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

There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance. — Michael Ondaatje

Seas move away, why not lovers? The harbours of Ephesus, the rivers of Heraclitus disappear and are replaced by estuaries of silt. The wife of Candaules becomes the wife of Gyges. Libraries burn. — Michael Ondaatje

Madox, what is the name of that hollow at the base of a woman's neck? At the front. Here. What is it, does it have an official name? That hollow about the size of an impress of your thumb?"
Madox watches me for a moment through the noon glare.
"Pull yourself together," he mutters. — Michael Ondaatje

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

She loves most the wet colours of his neck when he bathes. And his chest with with its sweat which her fingers grip when he is over her, and the dark, tough arms in the darkness of his tent, or one time in her room when light from the valley's city, finally free of curfew, rose among them like twilight and lit the colour of his body. — 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

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

Tell me, is it possible to love someone who is not as smart as you are? ... But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? ... Why is that? Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world. — Michael Ondaatje

Always listening, listening to the wet fluid speech with no order, unfinished stories, badly told jokes that he sober as a spider perfected in silence. — Michael Ondaatje

It is important to die in holy places. That was one of the secrets of the desert. So Madox walked into a church in Somerset, a place he felt had lost its holiness, and he committed what he believed was a holy act. — 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

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

In a breaker's yard you discover anything can have a new life, be reborn as part of a car or railway carriage, or a shovel blade. You take that older life and you link it to a stranger. — 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

Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. 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 we cross. — Michael Ondaatje

I want the marginality to come into the center. This is the thing I was conscious of growing up, when I later lived in England. I saw all these war movies that came out shortly after the war, and they were all about the war being fought by Englishmen or Americans, there were no other "allies" in it - from India or Australia, etc. — Michael Ondaatje

Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations. — 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

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

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

Nowadays he doesn't think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night. — Michael Ondaatje

Her body had been in a war and, as in love, it had used every part of itself. — 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

Give me a map and I'll build you a city. — 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

If a man's life could be capitalized as X, the risk at Y, and the estimated damage from explosion at V, then a logician might contend that if V is less than X over Y, the bomb should be blown up; but if V over Y is greater than X, an attempt should be made to avoid explosion in situ. — 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

The sloshing of their hooves in the paddy field that I heard thirty yards away, my car door open for the breeze, the haunting sound I was caught within as if creatures of magnificence were undressing and removing their wings — 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

Soldiers were coming in with just bits of their bodies, falling in love with me for an hour and then dying. — Michael Ondaatje

All I ever wanted was a world without maps. — Michael Ondaatje

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

Sometimes when she is able to spend the night with him they are wakened by the three minarets of the city beginning their prayers before dawn. He walks with her through the indigo markets that lie between South Cairo and her home. The beautiful songs of faith enter the air like arrows, one minaret answering another, as if passing on a rumor of the two of them as they walk through the cold morning air, the smell of charcoal and hemp already making the air profound. Sinners in a holy city. — 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

When we are young we do not look into mirrors. It is when we are old, concerned with our name, our legend, what our lives will mean to the future. We become vain with the names we own, our claims to have been the first eyes, the strongest army, the cleverest merchant. It is when he is old that Narcissus wants a graven image of himself. — 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

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

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