Top 300 Michael Ondaatje Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 7

51. “This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.”

— Michael Ondaatje

52. “Most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion.”

— Michael Ondaatje

53. “For the first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased.”

— Michael Ondaatje

54. “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

55. “But there was a discipline, it was just that we didn’t understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot – see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes.”

— Michael Ondaatje

56. “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

57. “Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.”

— Michael Ondaatje

58. “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

59. “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

60. “In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient’s mind.”

— Michael Ondaatje

61. “I’ve always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.”

— Michael Ondaatje

62. “You return to that earlier time armed with the present, and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing.”

— Michael Ondaatje

63. “During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed. So our job becomes to keep peace with enemy camps, eliminate the chaos at the end of Jacobean tragedies, and with ‘the mercy of distance’ write the histories.”

— Michael Ondaatje

64. “Nicholas Temelcoff is famous on the bridge, a daredevil. He is given all the difficult jobs and he takes them. He descends into the air with no fear. He is a solitary. He assembles ropes, brushes the tackle and pulley at his waist, and falls off the bridge like a diver over the edge of a boat.”

— Michael Ondaatje

65. “We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead.”

— Michael Ondaatje

66. “How can you smile as though your whole life hasn’t capsized.”

— Michael Ondaatje

67. “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

68. “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

69. “What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.”

— Michael Ondaatje

70. “I want to die on your chest but not yet she wrote sometime in the 13th century of our love.”

— Michael Ondaatje

71. “We have art,’ Nietzsche said, ’so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.”

— Michael Ondaatje

72. “I have to teach myself not to read too much into everything. It comes from too long having to read into hardly anything at all.”

— Michael Ondaatje

73. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

75. “I don’t think clarity is necessarily truth. It’s simplicity, isn’t it?”

— Michael Ondaatje

76. “A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something more than water. There is a plant whose heart, if one cuts it out is replaced with fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can drink the liquid amount of the missing heart.”

— Michael Ondaatje

77. “A memoir is the lost inheritance.”

— Michael Ondaatje

78. “You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.”

— Michael Ondaatje

79. “We are all the people we have ever known. We carry them for the rest of our lives, across every border we cross.”

— Michael Ondaatje

80. “A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.”

— Michael Ondaatje

81. “The word should be thinkering.”

— Michael Ondaatje

82. “There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You will find in this way the path of your life.”

— Michael Ondaatje

83. “He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?”

— Michael Ondaatje

84. “There is so much to know and we can only guess. Guess around him. To know him from these stray actions I am told about by those who loved him. And yet, he is still one of those books we long to read whose pages remain uncut. We are still unwise. It is not that he became too complicated but that he had reduced himself to a few things around him and he gave them immense meaning and significance.”

— Michael Ondaatje

85. “Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet.”

— Michael Ondaatje

86. “I shall have to learn how to miss you.”

— Michael Ondaatje

87. “It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you’re not.”

— Michael Ondaatje

88. “In darkness, in any light after dusk, you can slit a vein and the blood is black.”

— Michael Ondaatje

89. “So we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement.”

— Michael Ondaatje

90. “Don’t we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it.”

— Michael Ondaatje

91. “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

92. “Commissioner Harris at the far end stared along the mad pathway. This was his first child and it had already become a murderer.”

— Michael Ondaatje

93. “What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.”

— Michael Ondaatje

94. “In Canada pianos needed water. You opened up the back and left a full glass of water, and a month later the glass would be empty. Her father had told her about the dwarfs who drank only at pianos, never in bars.”

— Michael Ondaatje

95. “He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall.”

— Michael Ondaatje

96. “It’s why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.”

— Michael Ondaatje

97. “He can think now only of objects. Something alive, just one small grey bird on a branch, will break his heart.”

— Michael Ondaatje

98. “Do we eventually become what we are originally meant to be?”

— Michael Ondaatje

99. “I’m a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I’m a member of both countries.”

— Michael Ondaatje

100. “That’s one of the great sadnesses of any life – knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.”

— Michael Ondaatje