Top 100 Ondaatje Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Peggy Atwood, Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Michael Ondaatje - these are all old friends from my early 20s.
Clark Blaise
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Their bodies had met in perfumes, in sweat, frantic to get under that thin film with a tongue or a tooth, as if they each could grip character there and during love pull it right off the body of the other.
Michael Ondaatje
#9. We have art,' Nietzsche said, 'so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.
Michael Ondaatje
#10. -What do you hate most? he asks.
-A lie. And you?
-Ownership, he says. When you leave me, forget me.
Michael Ondaatje
#11. 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
#12. Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy
Michael Ondaatje
#13. From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.
Michael Ondaatje
#14. A woman should never learn to sew, and is she can she shouldn't admit to it
Michael Ondaatje
#16. Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.
Michael Ondaatje
#17. How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized
Michael Ondaatje
#18. 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
#19. I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me,will you. Stop defending yourself.
Michael Ondaatje
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. I am someone who has a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in place, and it will not fall.
Michael Ondaatje
#27. 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
#28. I was a man fifteen years older than she, you understand. I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book.
Michael Ondaatje
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Meanwhile with the help of an anecdote I fell in love. Words caravaggio. They have a power.
Michael Ondaatje
#32. He never used words or reason. He just moved dangerously among us.
Michael Ondaatje
#33. The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn't be.
Michael Ondaatje
#36. What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto.
Michael Ondaatje
#37. They had all grown older, but he still did not feel he had wisdom to go with his aging.
Michael Ondaatje
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Kirpal's left hand swoops down and catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkle at the edge of his eyes behind his spectacles.
Michael Ondaatje
#41. 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
#42. Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.
Michael Ondaatje
#43. Love is so small it can tear itself through the eye of a needle
Michael Ondaatje
#45. 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
#47. 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
#49. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.
Michael Ondaatje
#50. And that would be unconscionable, I suppose, to feel any obligation? Yes. Of course it would.
Katherine cliffton
The English Patient
Michael Ondaatje
#51. Githa Hariharan's fiction is wonderful-full of subtleties and humor and tenderness.
Michael Ondaatje
#52. 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
#53. She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.
Michael Ondaatje
#54. we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives
Michael Ondaatje
#55. Her body had been in a war and, as in love, it had used every part of itself.
Michael Ondaatje
#56. To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.
Michael Ondaatje
#57. Reason was the only thing that might save them, and there was no reason.
Michael Ondaatje
#59. The war is not over everywhere, she was told. The war is over. This war is over. The war here.
Michael Ondaatje
#60. She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.
Michael Ondaatje
#62. 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
#63. If you look at Japanese film, it is made up of collage or bricolage, it is made up of lists, and suddenly when you stand back from the lists you begin to see the pattern of a life.
Michael Ondaatje
#64. 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
#65. She had a laugh that hinted it had rolled around once or twice in the mud.
Michael Ondaatje
#66. The rulers of the country generally believed that betting eliminates strikes. Men had to work in order to gamble.
Michael Ondaatje
#67. There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.
Michael Ondaatje
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. In darkness, in any light after dusk, you can slit a vein and the blood is black.
Michael Ondaatje
#71. 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
#73. Could you waste your life on a gift? If you did not use your gift, was it a betrayal?
Michael Ondaatje
#75. 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
#76. We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.
Michael Ondaatje
#77. He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?
Michael Ondaatje
#78. 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
#79. 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
#81. 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
#82. I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear ...
Michael Ondaatje
#83. The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion
Michael Ondaatje
#84. She lights a match in the dark hall and moves it onto the wick of the candle. Light lifts itself onto her shoulders. She is on her knees. She puts her hands on her thighs and breathes in the smell of the sulphur. She imagines she slap breathes in light.
Michael Ondaatje
#86. 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
#87. He had been slowing down, the way one, half asleep, continually rereads the same paragraph trying to find a connection between sentences.
Michael Ondaatje
#88. Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.
Michael Ondaatje
#89. He can think now only of objects. Something alive, just one small grey bird on a branch, will break his heart.
Michael Ondaatje
#90. Character, that subtle art, disappeared among them during those days and nights, existed only in a book or on a painted wall.
Michael Ondaatje
#91. He refused to believe in his own weaknesses, and with her he had not found a weakness to fit himself against.
Michael Ondaatje
#92. The deepest sorrow, he thought. Where the only way to survive is to excavate everything.
Michael Ondaatje
#93. There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own.
Michael Ondaatje
#95. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
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