Michael Ondaatje Short Quotes

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

Michael Ondaatje
Love is so small it can tear itself through the eye of a needle

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

Michael Ondaatje
Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence.

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

Michael Ondaatje
From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.

Michael Ondaatje
What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto.

Michael Ondaatje
She had a laugh that hinted it had rolled around once or twice in the mud.

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

Michael Ondaatje
I want to die on your chest but not yet she wrote sometime in the 13th century of our love

Michael Ondaatje
He will hear the rain before he feels it, a clicking on the dry grass, on the olive leaves.

Michael Ondaatje
Meanwhile with the help of an anecdote I fell in love. Words caravaggio. They have a power.

Michael Ondaatje
Fathers die.You keep on loving them in any way you can.You can't hide him away in your heart.

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

Michael Ondaatje
He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?

Michael Ondaatje
Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.

Michael Ondaatje
But we were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past. We sailed into the past.

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

Michael Ondaatje
He came to this country like a torch on fire and he swallowed air as he walked forward and he gave out light

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
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
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
The desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.

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

Michael Ondaatje
What night gave Rafael was a formlessness in which everything had a purpose. As if darkness had a hidden musical language.

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

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
So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.

Michael Ondaatje