373 Quotes by Michael Ondaatje

There’s a lot of thievery involved in writing. You’re breaking into other people’s spaces and other people’s stories.

Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.

You don’t want to write your own opinion, you don’t want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.

I’ve always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.

Nowadays he doesn’t think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night.

This was the inheritance she had come back to, the prior life she had run from. She was once more back in a small repeating universe.

We order our lives with barely held stories. As if we have been lost in a confusing landscape, gathering what was invisible and unspoken – Rachel, the Wren, and I, a Stitch – sewing it all together in order to survive, incomplete, ignored like the sea pea on those mined beaches during the war. The greyhound is.

Those maps always oppressive with faith, as if the only purpose in life was to journey from one church altar to another rather than cross the meticulous blue of a river to reach a distant friend.

There is God only in the desert, he wanted to acknowledge that now. Outside of this there was just trade and power, money and war.