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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.
Michael Ondaatje
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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Heart
Deep
Wall
Cold
Instantly
Fall
Beside
Place
Barriers
Cannot
Throw
Someone
Grief
Great
Loss
More quotes by Michael Ondaatje
This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.
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A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
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The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.
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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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You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
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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.
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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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Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.
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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.
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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.
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I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.
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We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.
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It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
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Sadness is very close to hate.
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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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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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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)
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I want to die on your chest but not yet she wrote sometime in the 13th century of our love
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Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.
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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.
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