Top 300 Michael Ondaatje Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “The mole’s tunnelled chambers are crushed by wheels, The lark’s eggs scattered, their owners fled; And the hedgehog’s household the sapper unseals. The snail draws in at the terrible tread, But in vain; he is crushed by the felloe-rim. The worm asks what can be overhead, And wriggles deep from a scene so grim, And guesses him safe.”

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

253. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “When we are young, he thought, the first necessary rule is to stop invasions of ourselves. We know this as children.”

— Michael Ondaatje

259. “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

260. “There was something about him she wanted to learn, grow into, and hide in, where she could turn away from being an adult.”

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

262. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.”

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “For the heavens shall vanish away like smoke and the earth shall wax old like a garment. And they that dwell therein shall die in like manner. For the moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worms shall eat them like wool.”

— Michael Ondaatje

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

283. “He spends hours with the Englishman, who reminds him of a fir tree he saw in England, its one sick branch, too weighted down with age, held up by a crutch made out of another tree. It stood in Lord Suffolk’s garden on the edge of the cliff, overlooking the Bristol Channel like a sentinel. In spite of such infirmity he sensed the creature within it was noble, with a memory whose power rainbowed beyond ailment.”

— Michael Ondaatje

284. “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

285. “Some rooms could not be entered because of rubble. One bomb crater allowed moon and rain into the library downstairs –.”

— Michael Ondaatje

286. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

288. “Hello Buddy, good-bye Buddy. Caring was brief. There was a contract only until death.”

— Michael Ondaatje

289. “While I have used real names and characters and historical situations I have also used more personal pieces of friends and fathers. There have been some date changes, some characters brought together, and some facts have been expanded or polished to suit the truth of fiction.”

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

291. “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

292. “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

293. “We steered our way up a narrowing cut. It was a different atmosphere now, with sunlight falling through yellowing leaves, the smell of wet earth rising from the riverbanks. We had loaded the barge with boxes at Limehouse Reach, where The Darter said they made quicklime centuries earlier.”

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

295. “He rides the boat of morphine. It races in him, imploding time and geography the way maps compress the world onto a two-dimensional sheet of paper.”

— Michael Ondaatje

296. “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

297. “Now it seemed to others he had choreographed the arc of his career in order to attempt this one trick on the world.”

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

299. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje