Michael Ondaatje quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Michael Ondaatje

Top Michael Ondaatje Quotes

Browse top 177 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Michael Ondaatje.

Favorite Michael Ondaatje Quotes

1. "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

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

3. "If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door." ~ Michael Ondaatje

4. "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

5. "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

6. "Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light." ~ Michael Ondaatje

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

8. "To write about someone like myself would be very limiting." ~ Michael Ondaatje

9. "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

10. "You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which, for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel." ~ Michael Ondaatje

11. "She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape." ~ Michael Ondaatje

12. "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

13. "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

14. "we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives" ~ Michael Ondaatje

15. "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

16. "... 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

17. "All his life he has avoided permanent intimacy. Till this war he has been a better lover than husband. He has been a man who slips away, in the way lovers leave chaos, the way thieves leave reduced houses." ~ Michael Ondaatje

18. "Give me a map and I'll build you a city." ~ Michael Ondaatje

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

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

21. "The word should be thinkering." ~ Michael Ondaatje

22. "Secrets turn powerless in the open air." ~ Michael Ondaatje

23. "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

24. "The deepest sorrow, he thought. Where the only way to survive is to excavate everything." ~ Michael Ondaatje

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

26. "- Daca ti-as incredinta viata mea, ai scapa-o pe jos. Nu-i asa?" ~ Michael Ondaatje

27. "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

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

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

30. "I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts." ~ Michael Ondaatje

31. "I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently…but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur." ~ Michael Ondaatje

32. "How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized" ~ Michael Ondaatje

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

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

35. "…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

36. "Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth." ~ Michael Ondaatje

37. "... the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds." ~ Michael Ondaatje

38. "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

39. "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 hand and clutch it like a downer so they would pull you into their midst. Otherwise they, walking casually down the street towards you, almost about to wave, would leap over a wall and be gone for months." ~ Michael Ondaatje

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

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

42. "...record collection, with all those lifetimes and desires rhymed and distilled into two or three minutes of a song." ~ Michael Ondaatje

43. "First, he though, I need shoes with rubber on the bottom. I need gelato." ~ Michael Ondaatje

44. "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

45. "Moriamo.Moriamo ricchi di amanti e di tribu`, di gusti che abbiamo inghiottito, di corpi che abbiamo penetrato risalendoli come fiumi, di paure in cui ci siamo nascosti come in questa caverna stregata senza memoria.Voglio che tutto cio` resti inciso sul mio corpo. Siamo noi i veri paesi,non le frontiere tracciate sulle mappe con i nomi di uomini potenti.Lo so che tornerai e mi porterai fuori di qui, nel palazzo dei venti.Non ho mai voluto altro che camminare in un luogo simile con te. Una terra senza mappe.La lampada si e` spenta, e sto scrivendo nell'oscurita`." ~ Michael Ondaatje

46. "The man named Caravaggio pushes open all the windows in the room so he can hear the noises of the night. He undresses, rubs his palms gently over his neck and for a while lies down on the unmade bed. The noise of the trees, the breaking of moon into silver fish bouncing off the leaves of asters outside. The moon is on him like skin, a sheaf of water." ~ Michael Ondaatje

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

48. "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

49. "In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind." ~ Michael Ondaatje

50. "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

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