373 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 away the road. But now it looks as delicate as the path of a white butterfly in a long-exposed photograph.

The trouble with ideology, Alice, is that it hates the private. You must make it human.

Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.

I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear....

All I ever wanted was a world without maps.

Do you understand the sadness of geography?

All over the world there must be people like us, Anna had said then, wounded in some way by falling in love - seemingly the most natural of acts.

Miss Lasqueti consumed mostly crime thrillers, which constantly seemed to disappoint her. I suspect that for her the world was more accidental than any book’s plot. Twice I saw her so irritated by a mystery that she half rose from the shadow of her chair and flung the paperback over the railing into the sea.