Top 300 Michael Ondaatje Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

203. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

205. “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

206. “Soldiers were coming in with just bits of their bodies, falling in love with me for an hour and then dying.”

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

208. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

213. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

215. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

217. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

221. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

229. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

231. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

233. “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

234. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

236. “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

237. “Welcome to my neck of the woods. I love that phrase. As if it were part of a body.”

— Michael Ondaatje

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “What is that quality in us? Do you think? That makes us cause our own rain and smoke?”

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

245. “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

246. “I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book.”

— Michael Ondaatje

247. “He said later it was propinquity. Propinquity in the desert. It does that here, he said. He loved the word – the propinquity of water, the propinquity of two or three bodies in a car driving the Sand Sea for six hours. Her sweating knee beside the gearbox of the truck, the knee swerving, rising with the bumps. In the desert you have time to look everywhere, to theorize on the choreography of all things around you.”

— Michael Ondaatje

248. “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

249. “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

250. “But we were confident that Olive Lawrence had some tracing in her head from a faint light in the distance or a shift of wind that told her exactly where she was and what she was going towards.”

— Michael Ondaatje