Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert. And I? I was the skill among them. The mechanic. The others wrote out their love of solitude and meditated on what they found there. They were never sure of what I thought of it all. For them I was a bit too cunning to be a lover of the desert. More like Odysseus. Still, I was.

— Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje Quotes

I know how to divert them from agony. When to give the quick jolt of morphine in a major vein. The saline solution. To make them empty their bowels before they die. Every damn general should have had my job. Every damn general. It should have been a prerequisite for any river crossing. Who the hell were we to be given this responsibility, expected to be wise as old priests, to know how to lead people towards something no one wanted and somehow make them feel comfortable.

— Michael Ondaatje

Hello Buddy, good-bye Buddy. Caring was brief. There was a contract only until death.

— Michael Ondaatje

Thieves like us were used a great deal during this war. We were legitimized. We stole. Then some of us began to advise. We could read through the camouflage of deceit more naturally than official intelligence. We created double bluffs. Whole campaigns were being run by this mixture of crooks and intellectuals.

— Michael Ondaatje

I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book.

— Michael Ondaatje

I knew maps of the sea floor, maps that depict weaknesses in the shield of the earth, charts painted on skin that contain the various routes of the Crusades. So.

— Michael Ondaatje

He was an autodidact, and he believed his mind could read the motives and spirit behind any invention. He had immediately invented the pocket shirt, which allowed fuzes and gadgets to be stored easily by a working sapper.

— Michael Ondaatje

Some rooms could not be entered because of rubble. One bomb crater allowed moon and rain into the library downstairs –.

— Michael Ondaatje

At one point he put his nose close to a volume called Raymond, or Life and Death by Sir Oliver Hodge.

— Michael Ondaatje

He had come from a country where mathematics and mechanics were natural traits. Cars were never destroyed. Parts of them were carried across a village and readapted into a sewing machine or water pump. The backseat of a Ford was reupholstered and became a sofa. Most people in his village were more likely to carry a spanner or screwdriver than a pencil. A car’s irrelevant parts thus entered a grandfather clock or irrigation pulley or the spinning mechanism of an office chair.

— Michael Ondaatje

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.

— Michael Ondaatje

She stands up in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance.

— Michael Ondaatje

By August the blitz had begun, and in one month there were suddenly 2,500 unexploded bombs to be dealt with. Roads were closed, factories deserted. By September the number of live bombs had reached 3,700. One hundred new bomb squads were set up, but there was still no understanding of how the bombs worked. Life expectancy in these units was ten weeks.

— Michael Ondaatje

The year is 194-. What? For a second I forget. But I know the month and the day. One day after we heard the bombs were dropped in Japan, so it feels like the end of the world. From now on I believe the personal will forever be at war with the public. If we can rationalize this we can rationalize anything.

— Michael Ondaatje

Beef in my throat, the food has to climb over it and then go down and meet with all their pals in the stomach. Hi sausage. Hi cabbage. Did you see that fuckin boot. Yeah I nearly turned round ’n went back on the plate. Who is this guy we’re in anyway?

— Michael Ondaatje

The sun comes every day. Save the string. I put it in lines across the room. I watched him creep his body though the grilled windows. When the sun touches the first string wham it is 10 o’clock. It is 2 o’clock when he touches the second. When the shadow of the first string is under the second string it is 4 o’clock. When it reaches the door it will soon be dark.

— Michael Ondaatje

1859. Some of the causes of insanity were listed as: ill health, loss of property, excessive use of tobacco, dissipation, domestic affliction, epilepsy, masterbation, home-sickness, injury of the head. The largest category was “unknown.

— Michael Ondaatje

Who lays the crumbs of food that tempt you? Towards a person you never considered. A dream. Then later another series of dreams.

— Michael Ondaatje

While I have used real names and characters and historical situations I have also used more personal pieces of friends and fathers. There have been some date changes, some characters brought together, and some facts have been expanded or polished to suit the truth of fiction.

— Michael Ondaatje

We are foolish as teenagers. We say wrong things, do not know how to be modest, or less shy. We judge easily. But the only hope given us, although only in retrospect, is that we change. We learn, we evolve. What I am now was formed by whatever happened to me then, not by what I have achieved, but by how I got here.

— Michael Ondaatje

It was always raining and cold, and there was no order but for the great maps of art that showed judgement, piety and sacrifice. The Eighth Army came upon river after river of destroyed bridges, and their sapper units clambered down banks on ladders of rope within enemy gunfire and swam or waded across.

— Michael Ondaatje
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