Michael Ondaatje - Place Quotes

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

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

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

Michael Ondaatje
Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.

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
There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own.

Michael Ondaatje