76 Great Michael Ondaatje Quotes To Learn From
She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.
We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.
All I ever wanted was a world without maps.
...the heart is an organ of fire.
From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.
Her hand touched me at the wrist. "If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn't you?" I didn't say anything.
She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he had loved her when he understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become.
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.
I'll be looking at the moon, but I'll be seeing you.
This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.
...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.
Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again
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.
Don’t we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it.
He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?
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.
You built your walls too, she tells him. So I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he cannot stand. She with her beautiful clothes with her pale face that laughs at everyone who smiles at her...
For the first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased.
She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water.
A novel is a mirror walking down a road
Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy
Could you fall in love with her if she wasn't smarter than you? I mean, she may not be smarter than you. But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? Think now.
What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.
How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.
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
The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn't be.
For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.
I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear....
Do you understand the sadness of geography?
Death means you are in the third person.
