Michael Ondaatje Quotes

There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.

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

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.

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

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.

Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy

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.

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

That's one of the great sadnesses of any life - knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.

Most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion.

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

I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.

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.

In the desert you celebrate nothing but water.

All I ever wanted was a world without maps.

Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence.

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.

A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.

I think precision in writing goes hand in hand with not trying to say everything. You try and say two-thirds, so the reader will involve himself or herself.

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

It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not.

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

Death means you are in the third person.

Love is the use one makes of another.

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