Top 300 Michael Ondaatje Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.”

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

108. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

115. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

117. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

124. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

133. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

135. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

138. “Politically I also don’t believe anymore that we can only have one voice to a story, it’s like having one radio station to represent a country. You want the politics of any complicated situation to be complicated in a book of fiction or nonfiction.”

— Michael Ondaatje

139. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

141. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

144. “If you look at Japanese film, it is made up of collage or bricolage, it is made up of lists, and suddenly when you stand back from the lists you begin to see the pattern of a life.”

— Michael Ondaatje

145. “We keep wanting to save those who are forlorn in this world. It’s a male habit.”

— Michael Ondaatje

146. “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

147. “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

148. “He walked out of the hospital into the sun, into open air for the first time in months, out of the green-lit rooms that lay like glass in his mind. He stood there breathing everything in, the hurry of everyone. First, he thought, I need shoes with rubber on the bottom. I need gelato.”

— Michael Ondaatje

149. “The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat.”

— Michael Ondaatje

150. “Those maps always oppressive with faith, as if the only purpose in life was to journey from one church altar to another rather than cross the meticulous blue of a river to reach a distant friend.”

— Michael Ondaatje