Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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.
Michael Ondaatje
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Never
Forgiving
Guile
Lovers
Translate
Words
Selfishness
Language
Properly
Desire
Lover
Another
European
Everything
Motive
Long
Forgive
More quotes by Michael Ondaatje
A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out
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.
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.
Michael Ondaatje
We keep wanting to save those who are forlorn in this world. It’s a male habit.
Michael Ondaatje
You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
Michael Ondaatje
I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.
Michael Ondaatje
The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.
Michael Ondaatje
We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.
Michael Ondaatje
Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.
Michael Ondaatje
You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.
Michael Ondaatje
Snap. Lady with dog. Lady on sofa half-naked. Snap. Naked lady. Lady next to dresser. Lady at window. Snap. Lady on balcony sunlight. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)
Michael Ondaatje
I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.
Michael Ondaatje
Politically I don't believe anymore that we can only have one voice to a story, it's like having one radio station to represent a country.
Michael Ondaatje
You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
Michael Ondaatje
So we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement.
Michael Ondaatje
A novel is a mirror walking down a road
Michael Ondaatje
She had always wanted words, she loved them grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.
Michael Ondaatje
If you look at Japanese film, it is made up of collage or bricolage, it is made up of lists, and suddenly when you stand back from the lists you begin to see the pattern of a life.
Michael Ondaatje
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.
Michael Ondaatje
For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.
Michael Ondaatje