Top 300 Michael Ondaatje Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again.”

— Michael Ondaatje

2. “Do you understand the sadness of geography?”

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

4. “The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.”

— Michael Ondaatje

5. “The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion.”

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

7. “All I ever wanted was a world without maps.”

— Michael Ondaatje

8. “I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you.”

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

10. “It’s a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what’s beyond in the darkness, beyond where you’re writing.”

— Michael Ondaatje

11. “There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.”

— Michael Ondaatje

12. “In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.”

— Michael Ondaatje

13. “Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy.”

— Michael Ondaatje

14. “What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto.”

— Michael Ondaatje

15. “No story is ever told just once.”

— Michael Ondaatje

16. “Birds prefer trees with dead branches,’ said Caravaggio. ‘They have complete vistas from where they perch. They can take off in any direction.”

— Michael Ondaatje

17. “Half a page – and the morning is already ancient.”

— Michael Ondaatje

18. “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.”

— Michael Ondaatje

19. “The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn’t be.”

— Michael Ondaatje

20. “Sadness is very close to hate.”

— Michael Ondaatje

21. “Bridge depends on character. Your character and the character of your opponents. You must consider the character of your enemy. This is true of bomb disposal. It is two-handed bridge. You have one enemy. You have no partner. Sometimes for my exam I make them play bridge. People think a bomb is a mechanical object, a mechanical enemy. But you have to consider that somebody made it.”

— Michael Ondaatje

22. “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

23. “There were nights when Cullis would lie beside her, barely touching her with the tip of his finger. He would move down the bed, kissing her brown hip, her hair, to the cave within her. When they were apart he wrote how he loved the sound of her breath in those moments, the intake and release of it, paced and constant, as if preparing, as if knowing there was to be long distance ahead. His hands on her thighs, his face wet with the taste of her, her open palm on the back of his neck.”

— Michael Ondaatje

24. “So what was better for us all? An ignorance, or a cautiousness like his, towards our own hearts.”

— Michael Ondaatje

25. “There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.”

— Michael Ondaatje

26. “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

27. “Her hand touched me at the wrist. “If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn’t you?” I didn’t say anything.”

— Michael Ondaatje

28. “We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.”

— Michael Ondaatje

29. “Githa Hariharan’s fiction is wonderful-full of subtleties and humor and tenderness.”

— Michael Ondaatje

30. “Love is so small it can tear itself through the eye of a needle.”

— Michael Ondaatje

31. “The heart is an organ of fire.”

— Michael Ondaatje

32. “From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.”

— Michael Ondaatje

33. “Death means you are in the third person.”

— Michael Ondaatje

34. “We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.”

— Michael Ondaatje

35. “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

36. “A love story is not about those who lost their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing – not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.”

— Michael Ondaatje

37. “I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.”

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

39. “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

40. “I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.”

— Michael Ondaatje

41. “A novel is a mirror walking down a road.”

— Michael Ondaatje

42. “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

43. “Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.”

— Michael Ondaatje

44. “In the desert you celebrate nothing but water.”

— Michael Ondaatje

45. “Could you fall in love with her if she wasn’t smarter than you? I mean, she may not be smarter than you. But isn’t it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? Think now.”

— Michael Ondaatje

46. “Their bodies had met in perfumes, in sweat, frantic to get under that thin film with a tongue or a tooth, as if they each could grip character there and during love pull it right off the body of the other.”

— Michael Ondaatje

47. “How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.”

— Michael Ondaatje

48. “Meanwhile with the help of an anecdote I fell in love. Words caravaggio. They have a power.”

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

50. “All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.”

— Michael Ondaatje