Quote

I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.

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
Feels
Member
Always
Countries
Members
Citizens
House
Home
Lanka
Country
Canadian
Feel
Citizen

More quotes by Michael Ondaatje

Image
How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized
Michael Ondaatje
Image
I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.
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
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
All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
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
Image
Sadness is very close to hate.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.
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
I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.
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
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
Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
I promised to tell you how one falls in love.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.
Michael Ondaatje