Top 300 Michael Ondaatje Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “I was a man fifteen years older than she, you understand. I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book. I don’t believe in permanence, in relationships that span ages. I was fifteen years older. But she was smarter. She was hungrier to change than I expected.”

— Michael Ondaatje

152. “The sloshing of their hooves in the paddy field that I heard thirty yards away, my car door open for the breeze, the haunting sound I was caught within as if creatures of magnificence were undressing and removing their wings.”

— Michael Ondaatje

153. “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

154. “Whenever her father was alone with a dog in a house he would lean over and smell the skin at the base of its paw. This, he would say, as if coming away from a brandy snifter, is the greatest smell in the world! A bouquet! Great rumours of travel!”

— Michael Ondaatje

155. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

157. “I think precision in writing goes hand in hand with not trying to say everything. You try and say two-thirds, so the reader will involve himself or herself.”

— Michael Ondaatje

158. “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

159. “There always should be something hanging unfinished before a scene ends so that there’s a reason for going to the next scene.”

— Michael Ondaatje

160. “I can never understand someone by his strengths. Nothing is revealed there. I can only understand people by their weaknesses.”

— Michael Ondaatje

161. “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

162. “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

163. “Her face became tougher and leaner, the face Cara-vaggio would meet later. She was thin, mostly from tiredness. She was always hungry and found it a furious exhaustion to feed a patient who couldn’t eat or didn’t want to, watching the bread crumble away, the soup cool, which she desired to swallow fast. She wanted nothing exotic, just bread, meat.”

— Michael Ondaatje

164. “Could you waste your life on a gift? If you did not use your gift, was it a betrayal?”

— Michael Ondaatje

165. “She must have perceived how one could darken and make invisible or at least distant what is unhappy or dangerous in a life; I think her eventual skill with limelight and fictional thunder allowed her to clarify for herself what was true and what was false, safe and unsafe.”

— Michael Ondaatje

166. “He was a man of many doors. Were there other professions he nestled into, even briefly for an hour or two?”

— Michael Ondaatje

167. “I am a man who fasts until I see what I want.”

— Michael Ondaatje

168. “We are foolish as teenagers. We say wrong things, do not know how to be modest, or less shy. We judge easily. But the only hope given us, although only in retrospect, is that we change. We learn, we evolve. What I am now was formed by whatever happened to me then, not by what I have achieved, but by how I got here.”

— Michael Ondaatje

169. “The trouble with ideology, Alice, is that it hates the private. You must make it human.”

— Michael Ondaatje

170. “I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.”

— Michael Ondaatje

171. “Her father had taught her about hands. About a dog’s paws. Whenever her father was alone with a dog in a house he would lean over and smell the skin at the base of its paw. This, he would say, as if coming away from a brandy snifter, is the greatest smell in the world! A bouquet! Great rumours of travel! She would pretend disgust, but the dog’s paw was a wonder: the smell of it never suggested dirt. It’s a cathedral! her father had said, so-and-so’s garden, that field of grasses, a walk through cyclamen – a concentration of hints of all the paths the animal had taken during the day.”

— Michael Ondaatje

172. “The idea of a woman mailing a postcard as part of a promise to two children far away indicated an expansiveness as well as aloneness, a hidden need in her. It signalled two very different states.”

— Michael Ondaatje

173. “All over the world there must be people like us, Anna had said then, wounded in some way by falling in love – seemingly the most natural of acts.”

— Michael Ondaatje

174. “Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations.”

— Michael Ondaatje

175. “Fenelon-Barnes wanted the fossil trees he discovered to bear his name. He even wanted a tribe to take his name, and spent a year on the negotiations. Then Bauchan outdid him, having a type of sand dune named after him. But I wanted to erase my name and the place I had come from. By the time war arrived, after ten years in the desert, it was easy for me to slip across borders, not to belong to anyone, to any nation.”

— Michael Ondaatje

176. “What night gave Rafael was a formlessness in which everything had a purpose. As if darkness had a hidden musical language.”

— Michael Ondaatje

177. “But a man dancing close to her? I imagine a response of claustrophobia in her. She thrilled to open space and weather nights, as if she could never be contained or fully revealed there.”

— Michael Ondaatje

178. “There was a time when I could have slept with his friend Briffa, for instance. Around him the air was always fraught with possibilities.”

— Michael Ondaatje

179. “If you grow up with uncertainty, you deal with people only on a daily basis, to be even safer on an hourly basis. You do not concern yourself with what you must or should remember about them. You are on your own.”

— Michael Ondaatje

180. “Nowadays he doesn’t think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night.”

— Michael Ondaatje

181. “There was something about him she wanted to learn, grow into, and hide in, where she could turn away from being an adult. There was some little waltz in the way he spoke to her and the way he thought.”

— Michael Ondaatje

182. “Roman history, Nathaniel. You need to read it. It is full of emperors who cannot tell even their children what catastrophe is about to occur, so they might defend themselves. Sometimes there is a necessity for silence.”

— Michael Ondaatje

183. “The rulers of the country generally believed that betting eliminates strikes. Men had to work in order to gamble.”

— Michael Ondaatje

184. “Once I’ve discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.”

— Michael Ondaatje

185. “There is God only in the desert, he wanted to acknowledge that now. Outside of this there was just trade and power, money and war.”

— Michael Ondaatje

186. “One of the things that happens in novels it’s almost like a continual debate with yourself. That’s why you’re writing the book. It’s why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.”

— Michael Ondaatje

187. “People don’t write about kids; you have to give them a lot of freedom, and that causes anarchy and that causes farce.”

— Michael Ondaatje

188. “Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence.”

— Michael Ondaatje

189. “Someone’s war was slashing apart his delicate tapestry of companions. I was Odysseus, I understood the shifting and temporary vetoes of war. But he was a man who made friends with difficulty. He was a man who knew two or three people in his life, and they had turned out now to be the enemy.”

— Michael Ondaatje

190. “I kind of was shoveled onto a boat at 11 and went to England. I didn’t have any parent watching over me. It was very free and may have been a bit of a scary time for me, but I really don’t remember much about the voyage apart from playing ping-pong a lot with a couple friends.”

— Michael Ondaatje

191. “Love is the use one makes of another.”

— Michael Ondaatje

192. “When I write my novels I don’t really have a huge plan beforehand; I don’t have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it.”

— Michael Ondaatje

193. “He turns to her, sunlight in his eyes.”

— Michael Ondaatje

194. “It’s a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.”

— Michael Ondaatje

195. “Sometimes when she is able to spend the night with him they are wakened by the three minarets of the city beginning their prayers before dawn. He walks with her through the indigo markets that lie between South Cairo and her home. The beautiful songs of faith enter the air like arrows, one minaret answering another, as if passing on a rumor of the two of them as they walk through the cold morning air, the smell of charcoal and hemp already making the air profound. Sinners in a holy city.”

— Michael Ondaatje

196. “We order our lives with barely held stories. As if we have been lost in a confusing landscape, gathering what was invisible and unspoken – Rachel, the Wren, and I, a Stitch – sewing it all together in order to survive, incomplete, ignored like the sea pea on those mined beaches during the war. The greyhound is.”

— Michael Ondaatje

197. “I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.”

— Michael Ondaatje

198. “During our evenings in borrowed buildings, she would wake suddenly from a deep sleep, see me watching her, and release a guilty and delicious smile. I suppose that was the moment I felt I belonged most to her.”

— Michael Ondaatje

199. “This was the inheritance she had come back to, the prior life she had run from. She was once more back in a small repeating universe.”

— Michael Ondaatje

200. “Half the life of cities occurs at night,’ Olive Lawrence warned us. ‘There’s a more uncertain morality then.”

— Michael Ondaatje