Michael Ondaatje Quotes

78 Sourced Quotes

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
A libertine was one who made love before nightfall
Or without darkening the room.

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
In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover's name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence.

Michael Ondaatje
For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.

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

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
The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.

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
I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books.... All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.

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
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
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 before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East... 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
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
She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he had loved her when he understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become.

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