Michael Ondaatje quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, Michael Ondaatje has a lot to say. In this list we present the 60 best Michael Ondaatje quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!
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Michael Ondaatje quotes
We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.
— Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table
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, The English Patient
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, The English Patient
This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.
— Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter
We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
A blind lover, don’t knowwhat I love till I write it out
— 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, The English Patient
Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.
— 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, The English Patient
Girls with poison necklacesto save themselves from torture.Just as women wear amuletswhich hold their rolled up fortunestranscribed on ola leaf.
— Michael Ondaatje, Handwriting
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, The English Patient
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, The English Patient
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, The English Patient
I have been seeing dragons again.Last night, hunched on a beaver dam, one held a body like a badly held cocktail;his tail, keeping the beat of a waltz, sent a morse of ripples to my canoe.They are not richly brightbut muted like dawnsor the vague sheen on a fly’s wing.Their old flesh drags in foldsas they drop into grey pools, strain behind a tree.Finally the others saw one today, trapped, tangled in our badminton net.The minute eyes shuddered deep in the creased facewhile his throat, strangely fierce, stretchedto release an extinct burning inside:pathetic loud whispers as four of usand the excited spaniel surrounded him.
— Michael Ondaatje, The Dainty Monsters
She is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now, that only she can recognize in a mirror. Ideal and idealistic in that shiny dark hair! People fall in love with her. She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
But nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other’s presence. No one speaks of that exchange of gift and character — the way a person took on and recognized in himself the smile of a lover. Individuals are seen only in the context of these swirling social tides.
— Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family
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 English Patient
…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, Divisadero
Across the valley, a waterfall stumbles down. In a month or two the really hard rains will come down for eighteen hours a day and that waterfall will once again become tough as a glacier and wash away the road. But now it looks as delicate as the path of a white butterfly in a long-exposed photograph.
— Michael Ondaatje
The sloshing of their hooves in the paddy field that I heard thirty yards away, my car door open for the breeze, the haunting sound I was caught within as if creatures of magnificence were undressing and removing their wings
— Michael Ondaatje, Handwriting
But there was a discipline, it was just that we didn’t understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot – see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes. Listening to him was like talking to Coleman. You were both changing direction with every sentence, sometimes in the middle, using each other as a springboard through the dark. You were moving so fast it was unimportant to finish and clear everything. He would be describing something in 27 ways. There was pain and gentleness everything jammed into each number.
— Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter
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, The English Patient
Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.
— Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table
In spite of her desire for a contained universe, her life felt scattered, full of many small moments, without great purpose. That is what she thought, though what is most untrustworthy about our natures and self-worth is how we differe in our own realities from the way we are seen by others.
— Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero
The trouble with words is that you can really talk yourself into a corner. You can’t fuck yourself into a corner.”That’s a man talking, ” muttered Hana.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.
— Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion
She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
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.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
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, The English Patient
Do you understand the sadness of geography?
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
I can never understand someone by his strengths. Nothing is revealed there. I can only understand people by their weaknesses.
— Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost
The Englishman left months ago, Hana, he’s with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
Jung was absolutely right about one thing. We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.
— Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost
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, The English Patient
Aliganaya – ‘the embraceduring an intoxicated walk’or ‘sudden arousalwhile driving over speed bumps
— Michael Ondaatje, Handwriting
the heart is an organ of fire
— Michael Ondaatje
We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.
— Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family
I once traveled with a guide who was taking me to Faya. He didn’t speak for nine hours. At the end of it he pointed to the horizon and said, ‘Faya!’ That was a good day.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names… Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
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
I know the devices of a demon. I was taught as a child about the demon lover. I was told about a beautiful temptress who came to a young man’s room. And he, if he were wise, would demand that she turn around, because demons and witches have no back, only what they wish to present to you.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
How can you smile as though your whole life hasn’t capsized
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
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, The Cat’s Table
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, Divisadero
…how many of us have a moved heart that shies away to a different angle, a millimetre or even less from the place where it first existed, some repositioning unknown to us.
— Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table
-I think you are inhuman. If I leave you, who will you go to? Would you find another lover?I said nothing.-Deny it, damn you!
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me, will you. Stop defending yourself.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
In the morning she found pieces of a birdchopped and scattered by the fanblood sprayed onto the mosquito net, its body leaving paths on the wallslike red snails that drifted down in lumps.She could imagine the featherswhile she had sleptfalling around herlike slow rain.
— Michael Ondaatje, The Man with Seven Toes
There’s water in my bonesa ghost of a chance
— Michael Ondaatje, Handwriting
There was a time when I could have slept with his friend Briffa, for instance. Around him the air was always fraught with possibilities.
— Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion
But his own mind was helpless against every moment’s headline. He did nothing but leap into the mass of changes and explore them and all the tiny facets so eventually he was completely governed by fears of certainty. He distrusted it in anyone but Nora for there it went to the spine, and yet he attacked it again and again in her, cruelly, hating it, the sure lanes of the probable. Breaking chairs and window glass doors in fury at her certain answers. [15-16]
— Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter
I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he’s in love with ghosts.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
He refused to believe in his own weaknesses, and with her he had not found a weakness to fit himself against.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
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.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
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, The English Patient
Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
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, The English Patient
Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.
— Michael Ondaatje
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