Michael Ondaatje Quotes

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

~ Michael Ondaatje

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

There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.

~ 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

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. Icertainly wasn’t brave just now. I thought to myself, We have this villa this grass, we should have laindown 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 fleshthe colour of rivers and rocks or like the brown eye of a Susan, do you know what that flower is? Haveyou seen them? I am so tired, Kip, I want to sleep. I want to sleep under this tree, put my eye againstyour collarbone I just want to close my eyes without thinking of others, want to find the crook of a treeand climb into it and sleep. What a careful mind! To know which wire to cut. How did you know? Youkept saying I don’t know I don’t know, but you did. Right? Don’t shake, you have to be a still bed forme, let me curl up as if you were a good grandfather I could hug, I love the word ‘curl,’ such a slowword, you can’t rush it...

~ Michael Ondaatje

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

Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.

~ Michael Ondaatje

A blind lover, don't knowwhat I love till I write it out

~ 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

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 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

Girls with poison necklacesto save themselves from torture.Just as women wear amuletswhich hold their rolled up fortunestranscribed on ola leaf.

~ 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

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

Why are you not smarter? It's only the rich who can't afford to be smart. They're compromised. They got locked years ago into privilege. They have to protect their belongings. No one is meaner than the rich. Trust me. But they have to follow the rules of their shitty civilised world. They declare war, they have honour, and they can't leave. But you two. We three. We're free.

~ 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 brightbut muted like dawnsor the vague sheen on a fly's wing.Their old flesh drags in foldsas 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 facewhile his throat, strangely fierce, stretchedto release an extinct burning inside:pathetic loud whispers as four of usand the excited spaniel surrounded him.

~ 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

But nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other's presence. No one speaks of that exchange of gift and character --- the way a person took on and recognized in himself the smile of a lover. Individuals are seen only in the context of these swirling social tides.

~ 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

...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

Across the valley, a waterfall stumbles down. In a month or two the really hard rains will come down for eighteen hours a day and that waterfall will once again become tough as a glacier and wash away the road. But now it looks as delicate as the path of a white butterfly in a long-exposed photograph.

~ 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

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

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

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

~ Michael Ondaatje

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

~ Michael Ondaatje

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

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.

~ Michael Ondaatje

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

~ Michael Ondaatje

She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water.

~ Michael Ondaatje

He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall.

~ 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

Do you understand the sadness of geography?

~ Michael Ondaatje

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

~ Michael Ondaatje

Around three a.m. he feels a presence in the room. He sees, for the pulse of a moment, a figure at the foot of his bed, against the wall or painted onto it perhaps, not quite discernible in the darkness of foliage beyond the candlelight. He mutters something, something he had wanted to say, but there is silence and the slight brown figure, which could be just a night shadow, does not move. A poplar. A man with plumes. A swimming figure. And he would not be so lucky, he thinks, to speak to the young sapper again. He stays awake in any case this night, to see if the figure moves towards him. Ignoring the tablet that brings painlessness, he will remain awake till the light dies out and the smell of candle smoke drifts into his room and into the girl's room farther down the hall. If the figure turns around there will be paint on his back, where he slammed in grief against the mural of trees. When the candle dies out he will be able to see this. His hand reaches out slowly and touches his book and returns to his dark chest. Nothing else moves in the room. [298]

~ Michael Ondaatje

The Englishman left months ago, Hana, he's with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit.

~ Michael Ondaatje

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

~ 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

Aliganaya - 'the embraceduring an intoxicated walk'or 'sudden arousalwhile driving over speed bumps

~ Michael Ondaatje

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

~ Michael Ondaatje