Michael Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje
Philip Michael Ondaatje, OC, is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian novelist and poet. He won the Booker Prize for his novel The English Patient, which was adapted as the 1996 film of the same name...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 September 1943
CountryCanada
love heart loss
We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.
book character writing
One of the things that happens in novels it's almost like a continual debate with yourself. That's why you're writing the book. It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
hair long sorrow
The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion
wall crazy scratches
Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy
mean third-person persons
Death means you are in the third person.
our-love want century
I want to die on your chest but not yet she wrote sometime in the 13th century of our love
tears
We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them.
falling-in-love mean thinking
Could you fall in love with her if she wasn't smarter than you? I mean, she may not be smarter than you. But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? Think now.
dream children past
For the first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased.
trust order firsts
The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.
borders crosses our-lives
There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.
falling-in-love believe one-direction
I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently…but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.
men hands knowing
A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.
water desert celebrate
In the desert you celebrate nothing but water.