110+ Michael Ondaatje Quotes On Education, Death And And Marriage

Michael Ondaatje is a Canadian author and poet. He is best known for his novel The English Patient which won the Booker Prize in 1992. Ondaatje has written a number of other highly acclaimed novels, including Anil's Ghost and Divisadero. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Michael Ondaatje on love, education, death.

Top 10 Michael Ondaatje Quotes

1. That's Anil's path. She grows up in Sri Lanka, goes and gets educated abroad, and through fate or chance gets brought back by the Human Rights Commission to investigate war crimes.
2. We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.
3. A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.
4. For the first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased.
5. Death means you are in the third person.
6. As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.
7. I think precision in writing goes hand in hand with not trying to say everything. You try and say two-thirds, so the reader will involve himself or herself.
8. ... the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.
9. I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.
10. When you're writing, it's as if you're within a kind of closed world.

Michael Ondaatje Short Quotes

• All I ever wanted was a world without maps.
• It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
• A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
• In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.
• Come. We must go deeper with no justice and no jokes.
• Love is the use one makes of another.
• In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind.
• Githa Hariharan's fiction is wonderful-full of subtleties and humor and tenderness.
• Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy
• He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?

Michael Ondaatje Quotes About Love

A love story is not about those who lost their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing—not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past. — Michael Ondaatje

Love is so small it can tear itself through the eye of a needle — Michael Ondaatje

I want to die on your chest but not yet she wrote sometime in the 13th century of our love — Michael Ondaatje

Fathers die.You keep on loving them in any way you can.You can't hide him away in your heart. — Michael Ondaatje

I thought I was being loved because I was being altered. — Michael Ondaatje

I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts. — Michael Ondaatje

How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled. — Michael Ondaatje

In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover's name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence. — Michael Ondaatje

Meanwhile with the help of an anecdote I fell in love. Words caravaggio. They have a power. — Michael Ondaatje

...the heart is an organ of fire. — Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje Quotes About Write

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town. — Michael Ondaatje

You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else. — Michael Ondaatje

When I write my novels I don't really have a huge plan beforehand; I don't have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it. — Michael Ondaatje

There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories. — Michael Ondaatje

People don't write about kids; you have to give them a lot of freedom, and that causes anarchy and that causes farce. — Michael Ondaatje

I see myself as someone who's been saved by writing. God knows what I would have been, become or how I would have ended up without it. — Michael Ondaatje

It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not. — Michael Ondaatje

Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again. — Michael Ondaatje

To write about someone like myself would be very limiting. — Michael Ondaatje

It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing. — Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje Quotes About Story

She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams. — Michael Ondaatje

Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity. — Michael Ondaatje

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me. — Michael Ondaatje

Politically I also don't believe anymore that we can only have one voice to a story, it's like having one radio station to represent a country. You want the politics of any complicated situation to be complicated in a book of fiction or nonfiction. — Michael Ondaatje

It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow. — Michael Ondaatje

Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place. — Michael Ondaatje

There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You will find in this way the path of your life. — Michael Ondaatje

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. — Michael Ondaatje

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

Politically I don't believe anymore that we can only have one voice to a story, it's like having one radio station to represent a country. — Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje Quotes About Writing

As someone who writes novels that are often set in other periods of time or other ages or other landscapes, there's a certain element of research I have to do, and often, the more laconic people are, the more interesting they become. — Michael Ondaatje

One of the things that happens in novels it's almost like a continual debate with yourself. That's why you're writing the book. It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself. — Michael Ondaatje

If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door. — Michael Ondaatje

A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out — Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje Famous Quotes And Sayings

I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently…but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur. — Michael Ondaatje

For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell. — Michael Ondaatje

A postcard. Neat handwriting fills the rectangle. Half my days I cannot bear to touch you. The rest of my time I feel like it doesn’t matter if I will ever see you again. It isn’t the morality, it’s how much you can bear. No date. No name attached. — Michael Ondaatje

...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us. — Michael Ondaatje

What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves. — Michael Ondaatje

Nicholas Temelcoff is famous on the bridge, a daredevil. He is given all the difficult jobs and he takes them. He descends into the air with no fear. He is a solitary. He assembles ropes, brushes the tackle and pulley at his waist, and falls off the bridge like a diver over the edge of a boat. — Michael Ondaatje

I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation. — Michael Ondaatje

Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book. — Michael Ondaatje

I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries. — Michael Ondaatje

The rulers of the country generally believed that betting eliminates strikes. Men had to work in order to gamble. — Michael Ondaatje

The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat. — Michael Ondaatje

Every immigrant family, it seems, has someone who does not belong in the new country they have come to. It feels like permanent exile to that one brother or wife who cannot stand a silent fate in Boston or London or Melbourne. I’ve met many who remain haunted by the persistent ghost of an earlier place. — Michael Ondaatje

He walked out of the hospital into the sun, into open air for the first time in months, out of the green-lit rooms that lay like glass in his mind. He stood there breathing everything in, the hurry of everyone. First, he thought, I need shoes with rubber on the bottom. I need gelato. — Michael Ondaatje

Women want everything of a lover. And too often I would sink below the surface. So armies disappear under sand. And there was her fear of her husband, her belief in her honour, my old desire for self-sufficiency, my disappearances, her suspicions of me, my disbelief that she loved me. The paranoia and claustrophobia of hidden love. — Michael Ondaatje

You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel. — Michael Ondaatje

Don't we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it...There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language. — Michael Ondaatje

I am someone who has a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in place, and it will not fall. — Michael Ondaatje

Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border we cross. — Michael Ondaatje

And it would be a spare life he would be certain to lead as a schoolteacher in some urban location. 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

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

You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones. — Michael Ondaatje

Jung was absolutely right about one thing. We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you. — Michael Ondaatje

Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet. — Michael Ondaatje

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

We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them. — Michael Ondaatje

Her hand touched me at the wrist. "If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn't you?" I didn't say anything. — Michael Ondaatje

In the desert you celebrate nothing but water. — Michael Ondaatje

You think that you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something, you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you.... I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character. — Michael Ondaatje

She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he had loved her when he understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become. — Michael Ondaatje

This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning. — Michael Ondaatje

Sadness is very close to hate. — Michael Ondaatje

There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance. — Michael Ondaatje

I kind of was shoveled onto a boat at 11 and went to England. I didn't have any parent watching over me. It was very free and may have been a bit of a scary time for me, but I really don't remember much about the voyage apart from playing ping-pong a lot with a couple friends. — Michael Ondaatje

Nowadays he doesn't think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night. — Michael Ondaatje

This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world. — Michael Ondaatje

Most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion. — Michael Ondaatje

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

There's more danger in the violence you don't face. — Michael Ondaatje

What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto. — Michael Ondaatje

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting. — Michael Ondaatje

When I began to write novels, I wanted to keep that element of interaction with the reader that exists in poetry, not just for the reader to be shepherded from A to B to C to D but to participate, and the less you say sometimes, the better it is. You know, it's the way when someone speaks very quietly, you move forward so you can listen more carefully. — Michael Ondaatje

He was a man who wrote, who interpreted the world. Wisdom grew out of being handed just the smallest sliver of emotion. A glance could lead to paragraphs of theory. — Michael Ondaatje

Snap. Lady with dog. Lady on sofa half-naked. Snap. Naked lady. Lady next to dresser. Lady at window. Snap. Lady on balcony sunlight. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq) — Michael Ondaatje

The one of the great sadnesses of any life is knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then. — Michael Ondaatje

Tell me, is it possible to love someone who is not as smart as you are? ...But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? ...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

Do you understand the sadness of geography? — Michael Ondaatje

How we are almost nothing. We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of the draw, with little choice or determination on our part. — Michael Ondaatje

I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history. — Michael Ondaatje

A novel is a mirror walking down a road — Michael Ondaatje

What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. — Michael Ondaatje

You can see that the care he took defiling the beauty he had forced in them was as precise and clean as his good hands which at night had developed the negatives, floating the sheets in the correct acids and watching the faces and breasts and pubic triangles and sofas emerge. The making and destroying coming from the same source, same lust, same surgery his brain was capable of. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq) — Michael Ondaatje

Why are you not smarter? It's only the rich who can't afford to be smart. They're compromised. They got locked years ago into privilege. They have to protect their belongings. No one is meaner than the rich. Trust me. But they have to follow the rules of their shitty civilised world. They declare war, they have honour, and they can't leave. But you two. We three. We're free. — Michael Ondaatje

Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous. — Michael Ondaatje

You are doing something over here and over there someone is telling you a joke, or giving you an important piece of information about sanitation, and no matter how weird the other subject is, there is a connection, or you can make a connection. I’ve always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history. — Michael Ondaatje

There was always, he thought, this pleasure ahead of him, an ace of joy up his sleeve so he could say you can do anything to me, take everything away, put me in prison, but I will know [her] when we are old. — Michael Ondaatje

There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own. — Michael Ondaatje

You built your walls too, she tells him. So I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he cannot stand. She with her beautiful clothes with her pale face that laughs at everyone who smiles at her. — Michael Ondaatje

The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn't be. — Michael Ondaatje

It's an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country. — Michael Ondaatje

When we are young we do not look into mirrors. It is when we are old, concerned with our name, our legend, what our lives will mean to the future. We become vain with the names we own, our claims to have been the first eyes, the strongest army, the cleverest merchant. It is when he is old that Narcissus wants a graven image of himself. — Michael Ondaatje

In Canada pianos needed water. You opened up the back and left a full glass of water, and a month later the glass would be empty. Her father had told her about the dwarfs who drank only at pianos, never in bars. — Michael Ondaatje

I promised to tell you how one falls in love. — Michael Ondaatje

Half a page--and the morning is already ancient. — Michael Ondaatje

What night gave Rafael was a formlessness in which everything had a purpose. As if darkness had a hidden musical language. — Michael Ondaatje

I have to teach myself not to read too much into everything. It comes from too long having to read into hardly anything at all. — Michael Ondaatje

There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire. — Michael Ondaatje

He will hear the rain before he feels it, a clicking on the dry grass, on the olive leaves. — Michael Ondaatje

She moved from being a young woman into having the angular look of a queen, someone who has made her face with her desire to be a certain kind of person. He still likes that about her. Her smartness, the fact that she did not inherit that look or that beauty, but it was something searched for and that it will always reflect a present stage of her character. — Michael Ondaatje

Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners. — Michael Ondaatje

From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls. — Michael Ondaatje

But we were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past. We sailed into the past. — Michael Ondaatje

The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled. — Michael Ondaatje

When I read biographies, I skip the first thirty pages about the childhood because it doesn't seem interesting to me. — Michael Ondaatje

Life Lessons by Michael Ondaatje

1. Michael Ondaatje's writing emphasizes the importance of resilience in the face of life's challenges, teaching us to never give up and to keep striving for our goals.
2. His work also illustrates the power of connection and relationships, showing us that we can find strength in our relationships with others.
3. Finally, Ondaatje's writing encourages us to embrace our own unique journey, reminding us to be proud of our individual paths and to never be afraid to take risks.