Michael Ondaatje Quotes

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

3965

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.

2329

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.

2795

She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.

4817

We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.

1885

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.

3275

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.

4767

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.

2979

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.

3262

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

2682

If he could walk across the room and touch her he would be sane. But between them lay a treacherous and complex journey. It was a very wide world.

2529

Miss Lasqueti consumed mostly crime thrillers, which constantly seemed to disappoint her. I suspect that for her the world was more accidental than any book’s plot. Twice I saw her so irritated by a mystery that she half rose from the shadow of her chair and flung the paperback over the railing into the sea.

1932

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...

1106

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

2804

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.

3928

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.

4260

Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again

3084

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.

4369

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.

1594

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.

1632

The Englishman left months ago, Hana, he's with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit.

3994

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

3278

But the young sapper was already on his back, the rifle aimed, his eye almost brushing the beards of Noah and Abraham and the variety of demons until he reached the great face and was stilled by it, the face like a spear, wise, unforgiving.

4778

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.

4948

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.

1782

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.

3467

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

4057