Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Make
Shapes
Kings
Parading
Room
Anonymous
Rooms
Rebirth
Alone
Unknown
White
Corners
History
Shape
Something
King

More quotes by Michael Ondaatje

Image
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
Image
A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out
Michael Ondaatje
Image
A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
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.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized
Michael Ondaatje
Image
I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
All I ever wanted was a world without maps.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
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
Image
So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
There's more danger in the violence you don't face.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
When I write my novels I don't really have a huge plan beforehand I don't have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
That's one of the great sadnesses of any life - knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
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
Image
He turns his back to the far shore and rows toward it. He can in this way travel away from, yet still see, his house....he feels he is riding a floating skeleton...Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible.
Michael Ondaatje