Michael Ondaatje quotes

Michael Ondaatje is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian author, poet, and filmmaker, best known for his novel "The English Patient." His works often explore themes of memory, identity, and the intersections of diverse cultures. He has received numerous literary awards and continues to influence contemporary literature. Here are 94 of his quotes:

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town. (Michael Ondaatje)
From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls. View quote
Michael Ondaatje
The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn't be. View quote
Michael Ondaatje
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. View quote
Michael Ondaatje
It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself. View quote
Michael Ondaatje
A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch. View quote
Michael Ondaatje
It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow. View quote
Michael Ondaatje
A novel is a mirror walking down a road. View quote
Michael Ondaatje
How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled. View quote
Michael Ondaatje
For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places. View quote
Michael Ondaatje
Death means you are in the third person. (Michael Ondaatje)
Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert. View quote
Michael Ondaatje
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. View quote
Michael Ondaatje
Love is so small it can tear itself through the eye of a needle. View quote
Michael Ondaatje
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. View quote
Michael Ondaatje
All I ever wanted was a world without maps. View quote
Michael Ondaatje
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. View quote
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. View quote
Michael Ondaatje
Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again. View quote
Michael Ondaatje
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. View quote
Michael Ondaatje
This was the time in her life that she fell upon booksas the only door out of her cell. They became half her world. (Michael Ondaatje)
He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to? View quote
Michael Ondaatje
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... View quote
Michael Ondaatje
That's Anil's path. She grows up in Sri Lanka, goes and gets educated abroad, and through fate or chance gets brought back by the Human Rights Commission to investigate war crimes. View quote
Michael Ondaatje
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. View quote
Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje - Image
Photo: Tulane Public Relations, CC BY 2.0
Occupation: Canadian Author
Born: September 12, 1943
Quotes count: 94

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