Top 300 Michael Ondaatje Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

256. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

258. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

261. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

264. “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

265. “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

266. “We were Germans, English, Hungarian, African – all of us insignificant to them. Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states.”

— Michael Ondaatje

267. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

269. “Revealing his past or qualities of his character would have been too loud a gesture.”

— Michael Ondaatje

270. “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

271. “Our table’s status on the Oronsay continued to be minimal, while those at the Captain’s Table were constantly toasting one another’s significance. That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.”

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

277. “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

278. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

280. “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

281. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

283. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

290. “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

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.”

— Michael Ondaatje

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

300. “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