Top 300 Michael Ondaatje Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

157. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

173. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

175. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

182. “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

183. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

196. “The scale of the laying of mines in Italy and in North Africa cannot be imagined. At the Kismaayo-Afmadu road junction, 260 mines were found. There were 300 at the Omo River Bridge area. On June 30, 1941, South African sappers laid 2,700 Mark 11 mines in Mersa Matruh in one day. Four months later the British cleared Mersa Matruh of 7,806 mines and placed them elsewhere.”

— Michael Ondaatje

197. “But we were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past. We sailed into the past.”

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

199. “Kirpal’s left hand swoops down and catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkle at the edge of his eyes behind his spectacles.”

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje