Michael Ondaatje Quotes

all this Beethoven and rain ~ Michael Ondaatje

Secrets turn powerless in the open air. ~ Michael Ondaatje

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

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

They had all grown older, but he still did not feel he had wisdom to go with his aging. ~ Michael Ondaatje

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

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

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

Meanwhile with the help of an anecdote I fell in love. Words caravaggio. They have a power. ~ Michael Ondaatje

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting. ~ 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

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

He never used words or reason. He just moved dangerously among us. ~ 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

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

I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history. ~ 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

First, he though, I need shoes with rubber on the bottom. I need gelato. ~ 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

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

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

I want to die on your chest but not yet she wrote sometime in the 13th century of our love ~ Michael Ondaatje

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

I thought I was being loved because I was being altered. ~ Michael Ondaatje

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

Some people you just had to embrace, in some way or another, had to bite into the muscle, to remain sane in their company. You needed to grab their hair and clutch it like a drowner so they would pull you into their midst. ~ 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

He turns to her, sunlight in his eyes. ~ Michael Ondaatje

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

Don`t talk to me about Matisse
the European style of 1900, the tradition of the studio
where the nude style woman reclines forever
on a sheet of blood.

Talk to me instead about the culture generally
how the murderers were sustained
by the beauty robbed of savages: to our remote
villages the painters came, and our white-washed
mud-huts were splattered with gunfire. ~ Michael Ondaatje

All the time I hate what I am doing and want the other. In a room full of people I get frantic in their air and their shout and when I'm alone I sniff the smell of their bodies against my clothes. ~ Michael Ondaatje

When you attempt a memoir, I am told, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you, and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually towards you. 'A memoir is the lost inheritance,' you realize, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected. If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of another. So I believed something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her small hall of mirrors and I in mine. ~ 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

The rulers of the country generally believed that betting eliminates strikes. Men had to work in order to gamble. ~ 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

I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door. ~ 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

There's water in my bones
a ghost of a chance ~ Michael Ondaatje

She is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now, that only she can recognize in a mirror. Ideal and idealistic in that shiny dark hair! People fall in love with her. She is a woman I don't know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life. ~ Michael Ondaatje

I don't think clarity is necessarily truth. It's simplicity, isn't it? ~ Michael Ondaatje

She was organized, ardently neat, whereas he was the rabbit's wild brother, leaving what looked like the path of an undressing hurricane wherever he went. He dropped his shoes, badger coat, cigarette ash, a dish towel, plant journals, trowels, on the floor behind him, left washed-off mud from potatoes in the sink. Whatever he came upon would be eaten, wrestled with, read, tossed away, the discarded becoming invisible to him. Whatever his wife said about this incorrigible flaw did no good. I suspect, in fact, she took pleasure in suffering his nature. Though give him credit, Mr. Malakite's fields were immaculate. No plant left its bed and wandered off as a 'volunteer'. He scrubbed the radishes under the thin stream of a hose. He spread his wares neatly on the trestle table at the Saturday market. ~ Michael Ondaatje

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

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

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

As I prepare to leave she walks with me, half deaf and blind, under several ladders in her living room that balance paint and workmen, into the garden where there is a wild horse, a 1930 car splayed flat on its axles and hundreds of flowering bushes so that her eyes swim out into the dark green and unfocussed purple. There is very little now that separates the house from the garden. Rain and vines and chickens move into the building. Before I leave, she points to a group photograph of a fancy dress party that shows herself and my grandmother Lalla among the crowd. She has looked at it for years and has in this way memorized everyone's place in the picture. She reels off names and laughs at the facial expressions she can no longer see. It has moved, tangible, palpable, into her brain, the way memory invades the present in those who are old, the way gardens invade houses here, the way her tiny body steps into mine as intimate as anything I have witnessed and I have to force myself to be gentle with this frailty in the midst of my embrace. ~ 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

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

A memoir is the lost inheritance. ~ 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

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

I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear ... ~ 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

We have art,' Nietzsche said, 'so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth. ~ Michael Ondaatje

Blood a necklace on me all my life. ~ Michael Ondaatje

She had lived in that house fourteen years, and every year she had demanded of John that she be given a pet of some strange exotic breed. Not that she did not have enough animals. She had collected several wild and broken animals that, in a way, had become exotic by their breaking. Their roof would have collapsed from the number of birds who might have lived there if the desert hadn't killed three- quarters of those that tried to cross it. Still every animal that came within a certain radius of that house was given a welcome
the tame, the half born, the wild, the wounded. ~ Michael Ondaatje

Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again. ~ 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

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

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

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

Once they were sitting at the kitchen table opposite each other. To his right and to her left was a window. Furious at something he drew his right hand across his body and lashed out. Half way there at full speed he realized it was a window he would be hitting and breaked. For a fraction of a second hid open palm touched the glass, beginning simultaneously to draw back. The window scarred and crumpled slowly two floors down. His hand miraculously uncut. It had acted exactly like a whip violating the target and still free, retreating from the outline of a star. She was delighted by the performance. Surprised he examined his fingers. [p.16] ~ 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

we order our lives with barely held stories ~ 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

I can never understand someone by his strengths. Nothing is revealed there. I can only understand people by their weaknesses. ~ Michael Ondaatje

You have to protect yourself from sadness. Sadness is very close to hate. Let me tell you this. This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone else's poison – thinking you can cure them by sharing it – you will instead store it within you. Those men in the desert were smarter than you. They assumed he could be useful. So they saved him, but when he was no longer useful they left him. ~ 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

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

As if this collection of things is what she is. So we fall in love with ghosts. ~ 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

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

In darkness, in any light after dusk, you can slit a vein and the blood is black. ~ Michael Ondaatje

Those who had risked everything at a riverbend on a left turn and so discovered a fortune. ~ Michael Ondaatje

You're an archaeologist. Truth comes finally into the light. It's in the bones and sediment.

It's in character and nuance and mood.

That is what governs us in our lives, that's not the truth.

For the living it is the truth. ~ Michael Ondaatje

We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie. ~ Michael Ondaatje

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

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

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

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

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

... Even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between land and chart, between distances and legends, between nature and storyteller. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage, and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it. ~ Michael Ondaatje

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

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

At night, returning from work, Anil would slip out of her sandals and stand in the shallow water, her toes among the white petals, her arms folded as she undressed the day, removing layers of events and incidents so they would no longer be within her. She would stand there for a while, then walk wet-footed to bed. ~ Michael Ondaatje

When I write my novels I don't really have a huge plan beforehand; I don't have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it. ~ Michael Ondaatje

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

I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you.
Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying near me in the last year. I didn't feel scared. I
certainly wasn't brave just now. I thought to myself, We have this villa this grass, we should have lain
down together, you in my arms, before we died. I wanted to touch that bone at your neck, collarbone,
it's like a small hard wing under your skin. I wanted to place my fingers against it. I've always liked flesh
the colour of rivers and rocks or like the brown eye of a Susan, do you know what that flower is? Have
you seen them? I am so tired, Kip, I want to sleep. I want to sleep under this tree, put my eye against
your collarbone I just want to close my eyes without thinking of others, want to find the crook of a tree
and climb into it and sleep. What a careful mind! To know which wire to cut. How did you know? You
kept saying I don't know I don't know, but you did. Right? Don't shake, you have to be a still bed for
me, let me curl up as if you were a good grandfather I could hug, I love the word 'curl,' such a slow
word, you can't rush it... ~ 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

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

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

What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. ~ 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

A well-told lie is worth a thousand facts ~ 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

Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet. ~ 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

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