Michael Ondaatje Quotes

“From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.”

“All I ever wanted was a world without maps.”

“Death means you are in the third person.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.”

“Could you fall in love with her if she wasn't smarter than you? I mean, she may not be smarter than you. But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? Think now.”

“Love is so small it can tear itself through the eye of a needle”

“There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You will find in this way the path of your life.”

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

“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.”

“… the heart is an organ of fire.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“Don’t we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it.”

“A postcard. Neat handwriting fills the rectangle.

Half my days I cannot bear to touch you.
The rest of my time I feel like it doesn’t matter if I will ever see you again. It isn’t the morality, it’s how much you can bear.

No date. No name attached.”

“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.”

“He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?”

“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…”

“A novel is a mirror walking down a road”

“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.”

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

“Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy”

“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”

“Do you understand the sadness of geography?”

“The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn't be.”

“I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books…. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.”

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

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

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

“all this Beethoven and rain”

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

“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.”

“We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them.”

“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.”

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