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Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.

Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Light
Fragments
Different
Confusing
Years
Corners
Meaning
Seen
Lost
Place
Stories
Clearer

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The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.
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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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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.
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For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.
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How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized
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Come. We must go deeper with no justice and no jokes.
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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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He was a man who wrote, who interpreted the world. Wisdom grew out of being handed just the smallest sliver of emotion. A glance could lead to paragraphs of theory.
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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.
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It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.
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...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.
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She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.
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she had a laugh that hinted it had rolled around once or twice in the mud.
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All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
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Half a page--and the morning is already ancient.
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What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.
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Women want everything of a lover. And too often I would sink below the surface. So armies disappear under sand. And there was her fear of her husband, her belief in her honour, my old desire for self-sufficiency, my disappearances, her suspicions of me, my disbelief that she loved me. The paranoia and claustrophobia of hidden love.
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As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.
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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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I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.
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