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Michael Ondaatje Quotes

Philip Michael Ondaatje, , is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian poet, fiction writer, essayist, novelist, editor and filmmaker. He is the recipient of multiple literary awards such as the Governor General's Award, the Giller Prize, the Booker Prize, and the Prix Médicis étranger. Ondaatje is also an Officer of the Order of Canada, recognizing him as one of Canada's most renowned living authors.Ondaatje's literary career began with his poetry in 1967, publishing The Dainty Monsters, and then in 1970 the critically acclaimed The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. However, he is more recently recognized for his nationally and internationally successful novel The English Patient , which was adapted into a film in 1996. In 2018, Ondaatje won the Golden Man Booker Prize for The English Patient.In addition to his literary writing, Ondaatje has been an important force in "fostering new Canadian writing" with two decades commitment to Coach House Press , and his editorial credits on Canadian literary projects like the journal Brick, and the Long Poem Anthology , among others. Wikipedia  

✵ 12. September 1943
Michael Ondaatje photo

Works

The English Patient
The English Patient
Michael Ondaatje
The Cat's Table
The Cat's Table
Michael Ondaatje
In the Skin of a Lion
In the Skin of a Lion
Michael Ondaatje
The English Patient
The English Patient
Michael Ondaatje
The Cat's Table
The Cat's Table
Michael Ondaatje
In the Skin of a Lion
In the Skin of a Lion
Michael Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje: 44 quotes1 like

Famous Michael Ondaatje Quotes

“She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he had loved her when he understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become.”

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

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

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

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

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

“Death means you are in the third person.”

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

“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.”

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: 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 book Coming Through Slaughter

Source: Coming Through Slaughter

Michael Ondaatje Quotes about love

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

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: 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 book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

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

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

“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.”

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje Quotes about life

“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 book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

“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.”

Michael Ondaatje The Cat's Table

Source: The Cat's Table

“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 book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje Quotes

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

Michael Ondaatje The Cat's Table

Source: The Cat's Table

“… the heart is an organ of fire.”

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

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

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

“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 book The English Patient

Source: 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 book Divisadero

Source: Divisadero

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

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

“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.”

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: 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 book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

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

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

“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 book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

“A novel is a mirror walking down a road”

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

“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.”

Michael Ondaatje

Source: Handwriting

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

Michael Ondaatje The Cat's Table

Source: The Cat's Table

“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”

Michael Ondaatje book In the Skin of a Lion

Source: In the Skin of a Lion

“Do you understand the sadness of geography?”

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

“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.”

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: 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 book In the Skin of a Lion

Source: In the Skin of a Lion

“all this Beethoven and rain”

Michael Ondaatje book Running in the Family

Source: Running in the Family

“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.”

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

“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 book Divisadero

Source: Divisadero

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