Top 300 Michael Ondaatje Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “That’s Anil’s path. She grows up in Sri Lanka, goes and gets educated abroad, and through fate or chance gets brought back by the Human Rights Commission to investigate war crimes.”

— Michael Ondaatje

102. “Wherever Hana is now, in the future, she is aware of the line of movement Kip’s body followed out of her life. Her mind repeats it. The path he slammed through among them. When he turned into a stone of silence in their midst. She recalls everything of that August day – what the sky was like, the objects on the table in front of her going dark under the thunder.”

— Michael Ondaatje

103. “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

104. “In 1942 the Germans sent a spy called Eppler into Cairo before the battle of El Alamein. He used a copy of Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca as a code book to send messages back to Rommel on troop movements. Listen, the book became bedside reading with British Intelligence. Even I read it.”

— Michael Ondaatje

105. “So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.”

— Michael Ondaatje

106. “As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.”

— Michael Ondaatje

107. “Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.”

— Michael Ondaatje

108. “Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.”

— Michael Ondaatje

109. “Small gestures were enough for him. One bullet ended the war.”

— Michael Ondaatje

110. “She loves most the wet colours of his neck when he bathes. And his chest with with its sweat which her fingers grip when he is over her, and the dark, tough arms in the darkness of his tent, or one time in her room when light from the valley’s city, finally free of curfew, rose among them like twilight and lit the colour of his body.”

— Michael Ondaatje

111. “In my work I sometimes borrow Claire’s nature, as well as her careful focus on the world.”

— Michael Ondaatje

112. “There’s a lot of thievery involved in writing. You’re breaking into other people’s spaces and other people’s stories.”

— Michael Ondaatje

113. “If he could walk across the room and touch her he would be sane. But between them lay a treacherous and complex journey. It was a very wide world.”

— Michael Ondaatje

114. “In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.”

— Michael Ondaatje

115. “I promised to tell you how one falls in love.”

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

117. “I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.”

— Michael Ondaatje

118. “Quite early on I had discovered the overlooked space open to those of us with a silent life. I didn’t argue with the policeman who said I couldn’t cycle over a certain bridge or through a specific gate in the fort – I just stood there, still, until I was invisible, and then I went through. Like a cricket. Like a hidden cup of water.”

— Michael Ondaatje

119. “It’s an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country.”

— Michael Ondaatje

120. “I know the devices of a demon. I was taught as a child about the demon lover. I was told about a beautiful temptress who came to a young man’s room. And he, if he were wise, would demand that she turn around, because demons and witches have no back, only what they wish to present to you.”

— Michael Ondaatje

121. “Not that we are touched by such things as concern, even if false, when we are young. But now, in retrospect, I am touched.”

— Michael Ondaatje

122. “You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.”

— Michael Ondaatje

123. “I see myself as someone who’s been saved by writing. God knows what I would have been, become or how I would have ended up without it.”

— Michael Ondaatje

124. “There’s more danger in the violence you don’t face.”

— Michael Ondaatje

125. “We need parents when we’re old too.”

— Michael Ondaatje

126. “What had our relationship been? A betrayal of those around us, or the desire of another life?”

— Michael Ondaatje

127. “I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he’s in love with ghosts.”

— Michael Ondaatje

128. “There are those destroyed by unfairness and those who are not.”

— Michael Ondaatje

129. “We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them.”

— Michael Ondaatje

130. “I suppose we choose whatever life we feel safest in;.”

— Michael Ondaatje

131. “Research can be a big clunker. It’s difficult to know how you can make the historical light.”

— Michael Ondaatje

132. “He will hear the rain before he feels it, a clicking on the dry grass, on the olive leaves.”

— Michael Ondaatje

133. “He wants the minute and secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.”

— Michael Ondaatje

134. “Your own story is just one, and perhaps not the important one. The self is not the principal thing.”

— Michael Ondaatje

135. “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

136. “She would sit and read, the book under the waver of light. She would glance now and then down the hall of the villa that had been a war hospital, where she had lived with the other nurses before they had all transferred out gradually, the war moving north, the war almost over. 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

137. “People think a bomb is a mechanical object, a mechanical enemy. But you have to consider that somebody made it.”

— Michael Ondaatje

138. “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

139. “Come. We must go deeper with no justice and no jokes.”

— Michael Ondaatje

140. “A blind lover, don’t know what I love till I write it out.”

— Michael Ondaatje

141. “I was about to enter a borderless terrain between adolescence and adulthood.”

— Michael Ondaatje

142. “When she woke, she picked up a pair of scissors out of the porcelain bowl, leaned over and began to cut her hair, not concerned with shape or length, just cutting it away – the irritation of its presence during the previous days still in her mind – when she had bent forward and her hair had touched blood in a wound. She would have nothing to link her, to lock her, to death.”

— Michael Ondaatje

143. “If a wound is great you cannot turn it into something that is spoken, it can barely be written.”

— Michael Ondaatje

144. “You don’t want to write your own opinion, you don’t want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.”

— Michael Ondaatje

145. “Nothing lasts. Not even literary or artistic fame protects worldly things around us.”

— Michael Ondaatje

146. “She swabbed arms that kept bleeding. She removed so many pieces of shrapnel she felt she’d transported a ton of metal out of the huge body of the human that she was caring for while the army travelled north.”

— Michael Ondaatje

147. “He’d been a secretive man for most of his life, and now was disconcerted by the secrets he had kept from himself.”

— Michael Ondaatje

148. “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

149. “It is important to die in holy places. That was one of the secrets of the desert. So Madox walked into a church in Somerset, a place he felt had lost its holiness, and he committed what he believed was a holy act.”

— Michael Ondaatje

150. “The youth felt this was his first conversation in years.”

— Michael Ondaatje