Michael Ondaatje Quotes

All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.

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

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

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

In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.

Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.

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.

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

He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall.

We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.

How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized

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

Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.

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

I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.

Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence.

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

Half a page--and the morning is already ancient.

she had a laugh that hinted it had rolled around once or twice in the mud.

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

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

There always should be something hanging unfinished before a scene ends so that there's a reason for going to the next scene.

I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.

Come. We must go deeper with no justice and no jokes.

You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.

I'll be looking at the moon, but I'll be seeing you.

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

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.

For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.

I promised to tell you how one falls in love.

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

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

We keep wanting to save those who are forlorn in this world. It’s a male habit.

When you're writing, it's as if you're within a kind of closed world.

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.

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.

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 book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind.

So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.

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.

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

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

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

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.

So we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement.

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.

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

He came to this country like a torch on fire and he swallowed air as he walked forward and he gave out light

all this Beethoven and rain

To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.