Our table’s status on the Oronsay continued to be minimal, while those at the Captain’s Table were constantly toasting one another’s significance. That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.

— Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje Quotes

When we are young, he thought, the first necessary rule is to stop invasions of ourselves. We know this as children.

— Michael Ondaatje

We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.

— Michael Ondaatje

For the heavens shall vanish away like smoke and the earth shall wax old like a garment. And they that dwell therein shall die in like manner. For the moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worms shall eat them like wool.

— Michael Ondaatje

No one goes back to the husband. He knew that much about love and human nature.

— Michael Ondaatje

If anything she seems calm in this universe of hers.

— Michael Ondaatje

He always knew the layered grief of the world as well as its pleasures.

— Michael Ondaatje

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. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.

— Michael Ondaatje

She likes to lay her face against the upper reaches of his arm, that dark brown river, and to wake submerged within it, against the pulse of an unseen vein in his flesh beside her. The vein she would have to locate and insert a saline solution into if he were dying.

— Michael Ondaatje

Succinct histories tell us something – that anything peaceful has a troubled past.

— Michael Ondaatje

She finds rest as opposed to sleep the truly pleasurable state.

— Michael Ondaatje

That was how he felt safest. Revealing nothing.

— Michael Ondaatje

I was running to Asia and everything would change. It began with that moment when I was dancing and laughing wildly within the comfort and order of my life.

— Michael Ondaatje

It’s resplendent,” The Darter claimed that first weekend, one hand on the wheel, the other attempting to remove a sandwich from his pocket. He did not appear fully focused on the steering of the barge. A cold wind scalloped the water, gusting and shuddering against us from all sides.

— Michael Ondaatje

That there was nothing more assuring than a mask. Under the mask she could rewrite herself into any place, in any form.

— Michael Ondaatje

We steered our way up a narrowing cut. It was a different atmosphere now, with sunlight falling through yellowing leaves, the smell of wet earth rising from the riverbanks. We had loaded the barge with boxes at Limehouse Reach, where The Darter said they made quicklime centuries earlier.

— Michael Ondaatje

They would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation.

— Michael Ondaatje

Let me tell you about people my age. The worst thing is others assume you have developed your character by now. The trouble with middle age is they think you are fully formed.

— Michael Ondaatje

He was obsessed with the magic of air, those smells that turned neuter as they revolved in his lung then spat out in the chosen key. The way the side of his mouth would drag a net of air in and dress it in notes and make it last and last, yearning to leave it up there in the sky like air transformed into cloud. He could see the air, could tell where it was freshest in a room by the colour.

— Michael Ondaatje

He said later it was propinquity. Propinquity in the desert. It does that here, he said. He loved the word – the propinquity of water, the propinquity of two or three bodies in a car driving the Sand Sea for six hours. Her sweating knee beside the gearbox of the truck, the knee swerving, rising with the bumps. In the desert you have time to look everywhere, to theorize on the choreography of all things around you.

— Michael Ondaatje

This is what history means. He came to this country like a torch on fire and he swallowed air as he walked forward and he gave out light. Energy poured through him. That was all he had time for in those years. Language, customs, family, salaries. Patrick’s gift, that arrow into the past, shows him the wealth in himself, how he has been sewn into history. Now he will begin to tell stories.

— Michael Ondaatje
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