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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.

Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Find
Wounds
Everything
Keys
Sex
Tears
Morning
Lasts
Last
Wound
Night
Tear

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I promised to tell you how one falls in love.
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There's more danger in the violence you don't face.
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He walked out of the hospital into the sun, into open air for the first time in months, out of the green-lit rooms that lay like glass in his mind. He stood there breathing everything in, the hurry of everyone. First, he thought, I need shoes with rubber on the bottom. I need gelato.
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I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.
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There always should be something hanging unfinished before a scene ends so that there's a reason for going to the next scene.
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There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You will find in this way the path of your life.
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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.
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She had always wanted words, she loved them grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.
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The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.
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Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence.
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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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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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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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A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something more than water. There is a plant whose heart, if one cuts it out is replaced with fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can drink the liquid amount of the missing heart.
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Come. We must go deeper with no justice and no jokes.
Michael Ondaatje
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A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
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she had a laugh that hinted it had rolled around once or twice in the mud.
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We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.
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Nicholas Temelcoff is famous on the bridge, a daredevil. He is given all the difficult jobs and he takes them. He descends into the air with no fear. He is a solitary. He assembles ropes, brushes the tackle and pulley at his waist, and falls off the bridge like a diver over the edge of a boat.
Michael Ondaatje
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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