Michael Ondaatje Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

There's more danger in the violence you don't face.

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

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

A novel is a mirror walking down a road

Sadness is very close to hate.

Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. 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 we cross.

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

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.

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.

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.

What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.

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.

And it would be a spare life he would be certain to lead as a schoolteacher in some urban location. But he had a serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live. And this serenity and certainty I have seen only among those who have the armour of books close by.

Do you understand the sadness of geography?

When I began to write novels, I wanted to keep that element of interaction with the reader that exists in poetry, not just for the reader to be shepherded from A to B to C to D but to participate, and the less you say sometimes, the better it is. You know, it's the way when someone speaks very quietly, you move forward so you can listen more carefully.

She is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now, that only she can recognize in a mirror. Ideal and idealistic in that shiny dark hair! People fall in love with her. She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life.

What night gave Rafael was a formlessness in which everything had a purpose. As if darkness had a hidden musical language.

It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.

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

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.

There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own.

Half a page--and the morning is already ancient.

A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.