Top 300 Michael Ondaatje Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “At one point he put his nose close to a volume called Raymond, or Life and Death by Sir Oliver Hodge.”

— Michael Ondaatje

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

258. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

260. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

262. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

272. “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

273. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

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

— Michael Ondaatje

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

296. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje

298. “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

299. “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

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

— Michael Ondaatje