Michael Ondaatje Quotes

I once traveled with a guide who was taking me to Faya. He didn't speak for nine hours. At the end of it he pointed to the horizon and said, 'Faya!' That was a good day.

~ Michael Ondaatje

The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names... Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape.

~ 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

How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized

~ 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

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

...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

-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

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

~ Michael Ondaatje

In the morning she found pieces of a birdchopped and scattered by the fanblood sprayed onto the mosquito net,its body leaving paths on the wallslike red snails that drifted down in lumps.She could imagine the featherswhile she had sleptfalling around herlike slow rain.

~ Michael Ondaatje

There's water in my bonesa ghost of a chance

~ 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

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 am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.

~ 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

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

You think that you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something, you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you.... I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.

~ Michael Ondaatje

Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.

~ Michael Ondaatje

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

Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.

~ Michael Ondaatje