Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Michael Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje Quotes
78 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.
Michael Ondaatje
Source
Report...
What he would say, he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.
Michael Ondaatje
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.
Michael Ondaatje
Source
Report...
Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.
Michael Ondaatje
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
I love the performance of a craft, whether it is modest or mean-spirited, yet I walk away when discussions of it begin - as if one should ask a gravedigger what brand of shovel he uses or whether he prefers to work at noon or in moonlight. I am interested only in the care taken, and those secret rehearsals behind it. Even if I do not understand fully what is taking place.
Michael Ondaatje
Source
Report...
He was a man who wrote, who interpreted the world. Wisdom grew out of being handed just the smallest sliver of emotion. A glance could lead to paragraphs of theory.
Michael Ondaatje
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
A libertine was one who made love before nightfall
Or without darkening the room.
Michael Ondaatje
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.
Michael Ondaatje
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Jung was absolutely right about one thing. We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.
Michael Ondaatje
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.
Michael Ondaatje
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
1
2
3
4
Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Michael Ondaatje
Creative Commons
Born:
September 12, 1943
(age 80)
Bio:
Philip Michael Ondaatje is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian novelist and poet. He won the Booker Prize for his novel The English Patient, which was adapted as the 1996 film of the same name.
Known for:
The English Patient (1992)
Anil's Ghost (2000)
Divisadero (2007)
In the Skin of a Lion (1987)
Running in the Family (1982)
Most used words:
love
desert
heart
smarter
lives
fall
loved
order
life
light
place
hands
night
hidden
books
Michael Ondaatje on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Michael Ondaatje Quotes
Michael Ondaatje Short Quotes
Canadian Poet Quotes
Poet Quotes
20th-century Poet Quotes
Related People
Margaret Atwood
Canadian Poet
Walter Murch
American Designer
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes