Quotes by Michael Ondaatje

“Across the valley, a waterfall stumbles down. In a month or two the really hard rains will come down for eighteen hours a day and that waterfall will once again become tough as a glacier and wash a...”

“We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.”

“The sloshing of their hooves in the paddy field that I heard thirty yards away, my car door open for the breeze, the haunting sound I was caught within as if creatures of magnificence were undressi...”

“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 inn...”

“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...”

“This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.”

“I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you.Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying near me in the last year. I didnt feel s...”

“But there was a discipline, it was just that we didn't understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot - see his music...”

“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 ha...”

“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 nothingnot the wisdom of...”

“Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again”

“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-o...”

“Girls with poison necklacesto save themselves from torture.Just as women wear amuletswhich hold their rolled up fortunestranscribed on ola leaf.”

“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 ...”

“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...”

“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...”

“Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.”

“I have been seeing dragons again.Last night, hunched on a beaver dam,one held a body like a badly held cocktail;his tail, keeping the beat of a waltz,sent a morse of ripples to my canoe.They are no...”

“What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.”

“A blind lover, don't knowwhat I love till I write it out”