Quote

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

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
Others
Borders
Even
Hidden
Every
Cross
Crosses
Presence
Rest
Briefly
Known
Contain
Lives
Border

More quotes by Michael Ondaatje

Image
A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out
Michael Ondaatje
Image
Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
I want to die on your chest but not yet she wrote sometime in the 13th century of our love
Michael Ondaatje
Image
We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
There always should be something hanging unfinished before a scene ends so that there's a reason for going to the next scene.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
Fathers die.You keep on loving them in any way you can.You can't hide him away in your heart.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat.
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
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
Come. We must go deeper with no justice and no jokes.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion
Michael Ondaatje
Image
I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
What he would say, he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
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