The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje

But nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other’s presence. No one speaks of that exchange of gift and character — the way a person took on and recognized in himself the smile of a lover. Individuals are seen only in the context of these swirling social tides.

change, life, love

Michael Ondaatje

She is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now, that only she can recognize in a mirror. Ideal and idealistic in that shiny dark hair! People fall in love with her. She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life.

Michael Ondaatje

I have been seeing dragons again.Last night, hunched on a beaver dam,one held a body like a badly held cocktail;his tail, keeping the beat of a waltz,sent a morse of ripples to my canoe.They are not richly brightbut muted like dawnsor the vague sheen on a fly’s wing.Their old flesh drags in foldsas they drop into grey pools,strain behind a tree.Finally the others saw one today, trapped,tangled in our badminton net.The minute eyes shuddered deep in the creased facewhile his throat, strangely fierce, stretchedto release an extinct burning inside:pathetic loud whispers as four of usand the excited spaniel surrounded him.

domestic-life, humour, magic-realism, mythical-beasts

Michael Ondaatje

Why are you not smarter? It’s only the rich who can’t afford to be smart. They’re compromised. They got locked years ago into privilege. They have to protect their belongings. No one is meaner than the rich. Trust me. But they have to follow the rules of their shitty civilised world. They declare war, they have honour, and they can’t leave. But you two. We three. We’re free.

freedom, intelligence, privilege, rich, wealth

Michael Ondaatje

She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.

Michael Ondaatje

Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations.

dreams, meditation, sleep

Michael Ondaatje

Girls with poison necklacesto save themselves from torture.Just as women wear amuletswhich hold their rolled up fortunestranscribed on ola leaf.

fortune-telling, girls, jewelry, war, women

Michael Ondaatje

I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.

canada, desert, marriage, war

Michael Ondaatje

She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water.

Michael Ondaatje

She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.

Michael Ondaatje

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

books, humanity, literature, novels

Michael Ondaatje

Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.