Michael Ondaatje Quotes
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.
She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.
The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.
The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion
A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.
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.
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 that we cross.
He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?
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.
... the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.
...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.
I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.
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.
The rulers of the country generally believed that betting eliminates strikes. Men had to work in order to gamble.
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.
Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again
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.
That's one of the great sadnesses of any life - knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.
There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.
I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.
I want to die on your chest but not yet she wrote sometime in the 13th century of our love
He will hear the rain before he feels it, a clicking on the dry grass, on the olive leaves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
