Top 300 Michael Ondaatje Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Soldiers were coming in with just bits of their bodies, falling in love with me for an hour and then dying.”

— Michael Ondaatje

202. “When you’re writing, it’s as if you’re within a kind of closed world.”

— Michael Ondaatje

203. “In a breaker’s yard you discover anything can have a new life, be reborn as part of a car or railway carriage, or a shovel blade. You take that older life and you link it to a stranger.”

— Michael Ondaatje

204. “You did not speak for some time. You felt safer that way.”

— Michael Ondaatje

205. “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

206. “You’re getting everyone’s point of view at the same time, which for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.”

— Michael Ondaatje

207. “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

208. “Our heroes do not usually, after a certain age, teach or guide us anymore. They choose instead to protect the last territory where they find themselves. Adventurous thought is replaced with almost invisible needs. Those who once mocked the traditions they fought against with laughter now provide only the laughter, not the mockery.”

— Michael Ondaatje

209. “There’s always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.”

— Michael Ondaatje

210. “I often need a limited space. It’s like having a house to roam around in and reinvent and have things to happen in, kind of like a French farce. Doors opening, doors closing, new people arriving, and disappearing, and so forth.”

— Michael Ondaatje

211. “Just as no score relies on only one pitch or level of effort from musicians in the orchestra. Sometimes it relies on silence.”

— Michael Ondaatje

212. “People are not who or where we think they are. And there is someone who watches from an unknown location.”

— Michael Ondaatje

213. “At night, returning from work, Anil would slip out of her sandals and stand in the shallow water, her toes among the white petals, her arms folded as she undressed the day, removing layers of events and incidents so they would no longer be within her. She would stand there for a while, then walk wet-footed to bed.”

— Michael Ondaatje

214. “Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.”

— Michael Ondaatje

215. “Three flutes of champagne in the early afternoon anchored by the weight of nine oysters.”

— Michael Ondaatje

216. “I don’t have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.”

— Michael Ondaatje

217. “She thrilled to open space and weather nights, as if she could never be contained or fully revealed there.”

— Michael Ondaatje

218. “But isn’t it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love?”

— Michael Ondaatje

219. “Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.”

— Michael Ondaatje

220. “I love the performance of a craft, whether it is modest or mean-spirited, yet I walk away when discussions of it begin – as if one should ask a gravedigger what brand of shovel he uses or whether he prefers to work at noon or in moonlight. I am interested only in the care taken, and those secret rehearsals behind it. Even if I do not understand fully what is taking place.”

— Michael Ondaatje

221. “Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.”

— Michael Ondaatje

222. “Everyone has their own marriages, she thinks.”

— Michael Ondaatje

223. “I found her message heart-breaking in its cautiousness.”

— Michael Ondaatje

224. “As he steps back, away from her into the darkness, she cries out, “How do you live?” And our hero, played by Paul Muni, says, “I steal.”

— Michael Ondaatje

225. “To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.”

— Michael Ondaatje

226. “When Handel had his breakdown, he was, according to my opera-loving mother, “the ideal man” in that state, honourable, loving the world he could no longer be a part of, even if the world was a place of continual war.”

— Michael Ondaatje

227. “When I read biographies, I skip the first thirty pages about the childhood because it doesn’t seem interesting to me.”

— Michael Ondaatje

228. “He had been slowing down, the way one, half asleep, continually rereads the same paragraph trying to find a connection between sentences.”

— Michael Ondaatje

229. “She and I had lost each other long ago in those confusions and silences. But now, beside this infant, we were within an intimacy, as when sweat covered her face after a seizure and I would hug her to me. When being wordless had been best.”

— Michael Ondaatje

230. “The Darter must have been amazed by such rules and beliefs in a pregnant seventeen-year-old girl who would go on to cordon off the bad habits of his life so efficiently.”

— Michael Ondaatje

231. “He spoke of how viewers of his films should not assume they understood everything about the characters. As members of an audience we should never feel ourselves wiser than they; we do not have more knowledge than the characters have about themselves. We should not feel assured or certain about their motives, or look down on them. I believe this. I recognize this as a first principle of art, although I have the suspicion that many would not.”

— Michael Ondaatje

232. “A man not of your own blood can break upon your emotions more than someone of your own blood.”

— Michael Ondaatje

233. “Because what she wanted, I suspect, was a world she could fully participate in, even if it meant not being fully and safely loved.”

— Michael Ondaatje

234. “I know how to divert them from agony. When to give the quick jolt of morphine in a major vein. The saline solution. To make them empty their bowels before they die. Every damn general should have had my job. Every damn general. It should have been a prerequisite for any river crossing. Who the hell were we to be given this responsibility, expected to be wise as old priests, to know how to lead people towards something no one wanted and somehow make them feel comfortable.”

— Michael Ondaatje

235. “Poliziano translated Homer. He wrote a great poem on Simonetta Vespucci, you know her?”

— Michael Ondaatje

236. “Succinct histories tell us something – that anything peaceful has a troubled past.”

— Michael Ondaatje

237. “The year is 194-. What? For a second I forget. But I know the month and the day. One day after we heard the bombs were dropped in Japan, so it feels like the end of the world. From now on I believe the personal will forever be at war with the public. If we can rationalize this we can rationalize anything.”

— Michael Ondaatje

238. “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

239. “He was obsessed with the magic of air, those smells that turned neuter as they revolved in his lung then spat out in the chosen key. The way the side of his mouth would drag a net of air in and dress it in notes and make it last and last, yearning to leave it up there in the sky like air transformed into cloud. He could see the air, could tell where it was freshest in a room by the colour.”

— Michael Ondaatje

240. “It is a strange time, the end of a war.” “Yes. A period of adjustment.”

— Michael Ondaatje

241. “Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert. And I? I was the skill among them. The mechanic. The others wrote out their love of solitude and meditated on what they found there. They were never sure of what I thought of it all. For them I was a bit too cunning to be a lover of the desert. More like Odysseus. Still, I was.”

— Michael Ondaatje

242. “But I wanted to erase my name and the place I had come from. By the time the 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

243. “As if one of those love potions in A Midsummer Night’s Dream had been applied, only what you first saw on waking was not a love object but a source of fear, the source of a pummelling you had been through minutes before.”

— Michael Ondaatje

244. “Who lays the crumbs of food that tempt you? Towards a person you never considered. A dream. Then later another series of dreams.”

— Michael Ondaatje

245. “I once traveled with a guide who was taking me to Faya. He didn’t speak for nine hours. At the end of it he pointed to the horizon and said, ‘Faya!’ That was a good day.”

— Michael Ondaatje

246. “This is what history means. He came to this country like a torch on fire and he swallowed air as he walked forward and he gave out light. Energy poured through him. That was all he had time for in those years. Language, customs, family, salaries. Patrick’s gift, that arrow into the past, shows him the wealth in himself, how he has been sewn into history. Now he will begin to tell stories.”

— Michael Ondaatje

247. “Despair young and never look back,” an Irishman said. And this is what I did.”

— Michael Ondaatje

248. “At one point he put his nose close to a volume called Raymond, or Life and Death by Sir Oliver Hodge.”

— Michael Ondaatje

249. “Could you fall in love with her if she wasn’t smarter than you? I mean, she may not be smarter than you. But isn’t it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? Think now. Why is that? 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

250. “But here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defence but to look for the truth in others.”

— Michael Ondaatje