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Michael Ondaatje Quotes | Quotes said by Michael Ondaatje

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #1

    -I think you are inhuman. If I leave you, who will you go to? Would you find another lover?
    I said nothing.
    -Deny it,damn you!


  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #2

    ...how many of us have a moved heart that shies away to a different angle, a millimetre or even less from the place where it first existed, some repositioning unknown to us.

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #3

    ...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 Quote #4

    A blind lover, don't know
    what I love till I write it out

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #5

    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.

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #6

    Around three a.m. he feels a presence in the room. He sees, for the pulse of a moment, a figure at the foot of his bed, against the wall or painted onto it perhaps, not quite discernible in the darkness of foliage beyond the candlelight. He mutters something, something he had wanted to say, but there is silence and the slight brown figure, which could be just a night shadow, does not move. A poplar. A man with plumes. A swimming figure. And he would not be so lucky, he thinks, to speak to the young sapper again.
    He stays awake in any case this night, to see if the figure moves towards him. Ignoring the tablet that brings painlessness, he will remain awake till the light dies out and the smell of candle smoke drifts into his room and into the girl's room farther down the hall. If the figure turns around there will be paint on his back, where he slammed in grief against the mural of trees. When the candle dies out he will be able to see this.
    His hand reaches out slowly and touches his book and returns to his dark chest. Nothing else moves in the room. [298]

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #7

    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.

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #8

    But his own mind was helpless against every moment's headline. He did nothing but leap into the mass of changes and explore them and all the tiny facets so eventually he was completely governed by fears of certainty. He distrusted it in anyone but Nora for there it went to the spine, and yet he attacked it again and again in her, cruelly, hating it, the sure lanes of the probable. Breaking chairs and window glass doors in fury at her certain answers. [15-16]

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #9

    But nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other's presence. No one speaks of that exchange of gift and character --- the way a person took on and recognized in himself the smile of a lover. Individuals are seen only in the context of these swirling social tides.

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #10

    But there was a discipline, it was just that we didn't understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot - see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes. Listening to him was like talking to Coleman. You were both changing direction with every sentence, sometimes in the middle, using each other as a springboard through the dark. You were moving so fast it was unimportant to finish and clear everything. He would be describing something in 27 ways. There was pain and gentleness everything jammed into each number.

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #11

    Do you understand the sadness of geography?

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #12

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

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #13

    Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #14

    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 Quote #15

    He refused to believe in his own weaknesses, and with her he had not found a weakness to fit himself against.

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #16

    He was the best and the loudest and most loved jazzman of his time, but never professional in the brain. Unconcerned with the crack of the lip he threw out and held immense notes, could reach a force on the first note that attacked the ear. He was obsessed with the magic of air, those smells that turned neuter as they resolved in his lung then spat out in the chosen key. The way the side of his mouth would drag a net of air in and dress it in notes and make it last and last, yearning to leave it up there in the sky like air transformed into cloud. He could see the air, could tell where it was freshest in a room by the colour.

    ...Urging the band to play so loud the music would float down the street, saying 'Cornish, come on, put your hands through the window'. On into the night and into blue mornings, growing louder the notes burning through and off everyone and forgotten in the body because they were swallowed by the next one after and Bolden and Lewis and Cornish and Mumford sending them forward and forth and forth till, as he could see them, their bursts of air were animals fighting in the room.

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #17

    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 Quote #18

    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.

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #19

    How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #20

    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 Quote #21

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

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #22

    I am someone who has a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in place, and it will not fall.

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #23

    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.

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #24

    I have been seeing dragons again.
    Last night, hunched on a beaver dam,
    one held a body like a badly held cocktail;
    his tail, keeping the beat of a waltz,
    sent a morse of ripples to my canoe.

    They are not richly bright
    but muted like dawns
    or the vague sheen on a fly's wing.
    Their old flesh drags in folds
    as they drop into grey pools,
    strain behind a tree.

    Finally the others saw one today, trapped,
    tangled in our badminton net.
    The minute eyes shuddered deep in the creased face
    while his throat, strangely fierce, stretched
    to release an extinct burning inside:
    pathetic loud whispers as four of us
    and the excited spaniel surrounded him.

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #25

    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 Quote #26

    I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you.
    Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying near me in the last year. I didn’t feel scared. I
    certainly wasn’t brave just now. I thought to myself, We have this villa this grass, we should have lain
    down together, you in my arms, before we died. I wanted to touch that bone at your neck, collarbone,
    it’s like a small hard wing under your skin. I wanted to place my fingers against it. I’ve always liked flesh
    the colour of rivers and rocks or like the brown eye of a Susan, do you know what that flower is? Have
    you seen them? I am so tired, Kip, I want to sleep. I want to sleep under this tree, put my eye against
    your collarbone I just want to close my eyes without thinking of others, want to find the crook of a tree
    and climb into it and sleep. What a careful mind! To know which wire to cut. How did you know? You
    kept saying I don’t know I don’t know, but you did. Right? Don’t shake, you have to be a still bed for
    me, let me curl up as if you were a good grandfather I could hug, I love the word ‘curl,’ such a slow
    word, you can’t rush it...

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #27

    I was a man fifteen years older than she, you understand. I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book.

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #28

    I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me,will you. Stop defending yourself.

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #29

    I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.

  • Michael Ondaatje Quote #30

    In spite of her desire for a contained universe, her life felt scattered, full of many small moments, without great purpose. That is what she thought, though what is most untrustworthy about our natures and self-worth is how we differe in our own realities from the way we are seen by others.

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