Best Quotes by Michael Ondaatje (Top 10)
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She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.
Michael Ondaatje
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We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.
Michael Ondaatje
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All I ever wanted was a world without maps.
Michael Ondaatje
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I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently"¦but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.
Michael Ondaatje
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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
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A love story is not about those who lost their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing"not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.
Michael Ondaatje
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Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again
Michael Ondaatje
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Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy
Michael Ondaatje
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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.
Michael Ondaatje
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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.
Michael Ondaatje
More Michael Ondaatje Quotes
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There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You will find in this way the path of your life.
Michael Ondaatje
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How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.
Michael Ondaatje
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A novel is a mirror walking down a road
Michael Ondaatje
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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
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Why are you not smarter? It's only the rich who can't afford to be smart. They're compromised. They got locked years ago into privilege. They have to protect their belongings. No one is meaner than the rich. Trust me. But they have to follow the rules of their shitty civilised world. They declare war, they have honour, and they can't leave. But you two. We three. We're free.
Michael Ondaatje
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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.
Michael Ondaatje
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The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn't be.
Michael Ondaatje
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We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them.
Michael Ondaatje
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Death means you are in the third person.
Michael Ondaatje
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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.
Michael Ondaatje
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A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.
Michael Ondaatje
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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