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
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.
shapes clarity reason
She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.
country men order
The rulers of the country generally believed that betting eliminates strikes. Men had to work in order to gamble.
dog father taken
Her father had taught her about hands. About a dog's paws. Whenever her father was alone with a dog in a house he would lean over and smell the skin at the base of its paw. This, he would say, as if coming away from a brandy snifter, is the greatest smell in the world! A bouquet! Great rumours of travel! She would pretend disgust, but the dog's paw was a wonder: the smell of it never suggested dirt. It's a cathedral! her father had said, so-and-so's garden, that field of grasses, a walk through cyclamen--a concentration of hints of all the paths the animal had taken during the day.
dream sleep years
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.