373 Quotes by Michael Ondaatje

The idea of a woman mailing a postcard as part of a promise to two children far away indicated an expansiveness as well as aloneness, a hidden need in her. It signalled two very different states.

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. 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.

So what was better for us all? An ignorance, or a cautiousness like his, towards our own hearts.

I kind of was shoveled onto a boat at 11 and went to England. I didn’t have any parent watching over me. It was very free and may have been a bit of a scary time for me, but I really don’t remember much about the voyage apart from playing ping-pong a lot with a couple friends.

When she woke, she picked up a pair of scissors out of the porcelain bowl, leaned over and began to cut her hair, not concerned with shape or length, just cutting it away – the irritation of its presence during the previous days still in her mind – when she had bent forward and her hair had touched blood in a wound. She would have nothing to link her, to lock her, to death.

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.

The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn’t be.

When you’re writing, it’s as if you’re within a kind of closed world.