Michael Ondaatje Quotes

“Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.”
― Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

“Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me,will you. Stop defending yourself.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“-I think you are inhuman. If I leave you, who will you go to? Would you find another lover?
I said nothing.
-Deny it,damn you!”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Commissioner Harris at the far end stared along the mad pathway. This was his first child and it had already become a murderer.”
― Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

“The Bedouin were keeping me alive for a reason. I was useful, you see. someone there had assumed I had a skill when my plane crashed in the desert. I am a man who can recognized an unnamed town by its skeletal shape on a map. I have always had information like a sea in me. I am a person who if left alone in someone´s home walks to the bookcase, pulls down a volume and inhales it. So history enters us. 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”
― Michael Ondaatje