Michael Ondaatje Quotes
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What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto.
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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.
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One of the things that happens in novels it's almost like a continual debate with yourself. That's why you're writing the book. It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
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Fathers die.You keep on loving them in any way you can.You can't hide him away in your heart.
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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.
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Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.
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Tell me, is it possible to love someone who is not as smart as you are? ...But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? ...Why is that? Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.
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Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.
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This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.
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I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.
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I often need a limited space. It's like having a house to roam around in and reinvent and have things to happen in, kind of like a French farce. Doors opening, doors closing, new people arriving, and disappearing, and so forth.
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Don't we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it...There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out
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What night gave Rafael was a formlessness in which everything had a purpose. As if darkness had a hidden musical language.
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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.
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There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.
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Half a page--and the morning is already ancient.
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all this Beethoven and rain
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I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.
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Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.
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I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.
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Love is the use one makes of another.
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...the heart is an organ of fire.
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It's an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country.
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I want to die on your chest but not yet she wrote sometime in the 13th century of our love
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All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
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He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?
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