Top 300 Michael Ondaatje Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “Intotdeauna si-a dorit cuvinte, le iubea, crescuse printre ele. Cuvintele ii dadeau claritate, ii ofereau o logica, un tipar. Pe cand eu simteam ca vorbele indoaie emotiile ca pe niste nuiele inmuiate in apa.”

— Michael Ondaatje

253. “Who realizes how contented feral children are? The grasp of the family fell away as soon as I was out the door.”

— Michael Ondaatje

254. “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

255. “In nearly every house, in nearly every family, there was knowledge of someone’s murder or abduction by one side or another.”

— Michael Ondaatje

256. “He had approached the villa on that night of the storm not out of curiosity about the music but because of a danger to the piano player. The retreating army often left pencil mines within musical instruments. Returning owners opened up pianos and lost their hands. People would revive the swing on a grandfather clock, and a glass bomb would blow out half a wall and whoever was nearby.”

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

258. “I was running to Asia and everything would change. It began with that moment when I was dancing and laughing wildly within the comfort and order of my life.”

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

260. “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

261. “That there was nothing more assuring than a mask. Under the mask she could rewrite herself into any place, in any form.”

— Michael Ondaatje

262. “We are the real countries, not the boundaries drawn on maps with the names of powerful men.”

— Michael Ondaatje

263. “She could not forget the depth of her sleep, the lightness of her plummet.”

— Michael Ondaatje

264. “She finds rest as opposed to sleep the truly pleasurable state.”

— Michael Ondaatje

265. “But the book again is incomplete. In the end all your children move among the scattered acts and memories with no more clues. Not that we ever thought we would be able to fully understand you. Love is often enough, towards your stadium of small things.”

— Michael Ondaatje

266. “The Germans evacuated Naples on October 1, 1943. During an Allied raid the previous September, hundreds of citizens had walked away and begun living in the caves outside the city. The Germans in their retreat bombed the entrance to the caves, forcing the citizens to stay underground. A typhus epidemic broke out. In the harbour scuttled ships were freshly mined underwater.”

— Michael Ondaatje

267. “Let me tell you about people my age. The worst thing is others assume you have developed your character by now. The trouble with middle age is they think you are fully formed.”

— Michael Ondaatje

268. “She wanted Kip to know her only in the present, a person perhaps more flawed or more compassionate or harder or more obsessed than the girl or young woman she had been then.”

— Michael Ondaatje

269. “That was how he felt safest. Revealing nothing.”

— Michael Ondaatje

270. “Thieves like us were used a great deal during this war. We were legitimized. We stole. Then some of us began to advise. We could read through the camouflage of deceit more naturally than official intelligence. We created double bluffs. Whole campaigns were being run by this mixture of crooks and intellectuals.”

— Michael Ondaatje

271. “If anything she seems calm in this universe of hers.”

— Michael Ondaatje

272. “1859. Some of the causes of insanity were listed as: ill health, loss of property, excessive use of tobacco, dissipation, domestic affliction, epilepsy, masterbation, home-sickness, injury of the head. The largest category was “unknown.”

— Michael Ondaatje

273. “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

274. “The way the terrorists in our time can be made to believe they are eternal if they die for the cause of their ruler.”

— Michael Ondaatje

275. “They had all grown older, but he still did not feel he had wisdom to go with his aging.”

— Michael Ondaatje

276. “He has come across a love story. This is only a love story. He does not wish for plot and all its consequences. Let me stay in this field with Alice Gull...”

— Michael Ondaatje

277. “I knew maps of the sea floor, maps that depict weaknesses in the shield of the earth, charts painted on skin that contain the various routes of the Crusades. So.”

— Michael Ondaatje

278. “She walks down the hall and climbs into her hammock, giving it a swing as she leaves the ground. 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. Caravaggio has for instance given her something. His motive, a drama, and a stolen image.”

— Michael Ondaatje

279. “By August the blitz had begun, and in one month there were suddenly 2,500 unexploded bombs to be dealt with. Roads were closed, factories deserted. By September the number of live bombs had reached 3,700. One hundred new bomb squads were set up, but there was still no understanding of how the bombs worked. Life expectancy in these units was ten weeks.”

— Michael Ondaatje

280. “He was an autodidact, and he believed his mind could read the motives and spirit behind any invention. He had immediately invented the pocket shirt, which allowed fuzes and gadgets to be stored easily by a working sapper.”

— Michael Ondaatje

281. “She likes to lay her face against the upper reaches of his arm, that dark brown river, and to wake submerged within it, against the pulse of an unseen vein in his flesh beside her. The vein she would have to locate and insert a saline solution into if he were dying.”

— Michael Ondaatje

282. “With his wounds, his unbalance, the grey curls at the back of his neck. He had never imagined himself to be a man with a sense of age and wisdom. They had all grown older, but he still did not feel he had wisdom to go with his aging.”

— Michael Ondaatje

283. “It was always raining and cold, and there was no order but for the great maps of art that showed judgement, piety and sacrifice. The Eighth Army came upon river after river of destroyed bridges, and their sapper units clambered down banks on ladders of rope within enemy gunfire and swam or waded across.”

— Michael Ondaatje

284. “Beef in my throat, the food has to climb over it and then go down and meet with all their pals in the stomach. Hi sausage. Hi cabbage. Did you see that fuckin boot. Yeah I nearly turned round ’n went back on the plate. Who is this guy we’re in anyway?”

— Michael Ondaatje

285. “They would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation.”

— Michael Ondaatje

286. “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

287. “He had approached the villa on that night of the storm not out of curiosity about the music but because of a danger to the piano player. The retreating army often left pencil mines within musical instruments. Returning owners opened up pianos and lost their hands.”

— Michael Ondaatje

288. “Some people you just had to embrace, in some way or another, had to bite into the muscle, to remain sane in their company. You needed to grab their hand and clutch it like a downer so they would pull you into their midst. Otherwise they, walking casually down the street towards you, almost about to wave, would leap over a wall and be gone for months.”

— Michael Ondaatje

289. “She was unaware, in fact, how close she was to The Darter, who was hiding in my room, reading the Beano.”

— Michael Ondaatje

290. “No one goes back to the husband. He knew that much about love and human nature.”

— Michael Ondaatje

291. “The sun comes every day. Save the string. I put it in lines across the room. I watched him creep his body though the grilled windows. When the sun touches the first string wham it is 10 o’clock. It is 2 o’clock when he touches the second. When the shadow of the first string is under the second string it is 4 o’clock. When it reaches the door it will soon be dark.”

— Michael Ondaatje

292. “He had come from a country where mathematics and mechanics were natural traits. Cars were never destroyed. Parts of them were carried across a village and readapted into a sewing machine or water pump. The backseat of a Ford was reupholstered and became a sofa. Most people in his village were more likely to carry a spanner or screwdriver than a pencil. A car’s irrelevant parts thus entered a grandfather clock or irrigation pulley or the spinning mechanism of an office chair.”

— Michael Ondaatje

293. “Everything I have loved or valued has been taken away from me.”

— Michael Ondaatje

294. “Ora li amava, questi libri rilegati con i dorsi all’italiana, i frontespizi, le illustrazioni ad acquerello, le copertine telate, amava il loro odore, perfino i loro scricchiolii quando li apriva in fetta, quasi si rompesse una serie di minuscole ossa invisibili.”

— Michael Ondaatje

295. “During the day she notices mostly his arms in the short-sleeved army shirt and the rifle which is always with him, even though battles seem now to be over for them. He has various postures with the gun – half-staff, half a crook for his elbows when it is over his shoulders. He will turn, suddenly realizing she is watching him. He is a survivor of his fears, will step around anything suspicious, acknowledging her look in this panorama as if claiming he can deal with it all.”

— Michael Ondaatje

296. “It was your year of last things, but you were luminous, within those final fires.”

— Michael Ondaatje

297. “He always knew the layered grief of the world as well as its pleasures.”

— Michael Ondaatje

298. “This history of mine,′ Herodotus says, ‘has from the beginning sought out the supplementary to the main argument.’ What you find in him are cul-de-sacs within the sweep of history – how people betray each other for the sake of nations, how people fall in love...”

— Michael Ondaatje

299. “She stands up in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance.”

— Michael Ondaatje

300. “It’s resplendent,” The Darter claimed that first weekend, one hand on the wheel, the other attempting to remove a sandwich from his pocket. He did not appear fully focused on the steering of the barge. A cold wind scalloped the water, gusting and shuddering against us from all sides.”

— Michael Ondaatje