Michael Ondaatje Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Michael Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Michael Ondaatje on Wise Famous Quotes.
I was a man fifteen years older than she, you understand. I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book.
That's one of the great sadnesses of any life - knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.
Sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.
For when people leave our company in our time we are never certain of seeing them again, or seeing them unaltered.
The rulers of the country generally believed that betting eliminates strikes. Men had to work in order to gamble.
So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.
The right ending is an open door you can't see too far out of. It can mean exactly the opposite of what you are thinking.
Maybe this is the way to come out of a war, he thinks. A burned man to care for, some sheets to wash in a fountain, a room painted like a garden.
The important thing is to be able to live in a place or a situation where you must use your sixth sense all the time.
Every river they came to was bridge-less, as if its name had been erased, as if the sky were starless, homes doorless.
The noise of the trees, the breaking of moon into silver fish bouncing off the leaves of asters outside.
Record collection, with all those lifetimes and desires rhymed and distilled into two or three minutes of a song.
And that would be unconscionable, I suppose, to feel any obligation? Yes. Of course it would.
Katherine cliffton
The English Patient
Katherine cliffton
The English Patient
The Englishman left months ago, Hana, he's with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit.
You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
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.
Who realizes how contented feral children are? The grasp of the family fell away as soon as I was out the door.
Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.
Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.
Jung was absolutely right about one thing. We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.
I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.
In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover's name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence.
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.
You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
He came to this country like a torch on fire and he swallowed air as he walked forward and he gave out light
There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.
There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own.
She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.
When I read biographies, I skip the first thirty pages about the childhood because it doesn't seem interesting to me.
There is God only in the desert, he wanted to acknowledge that now. Outside of this there was just trade and power, money and war.
In Asian gardens you could look at rock and imagine water, you could gaze at a still pool and believe it had the hardness of rock.
Mockery had gone too far during Hearts. There had been an attempt at strangulation and then her ear had been perforated by a fork.
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.
I didn't say anything.
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.