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
plot stories theme
I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.
fiction wonderful subtlety
Githa Hariharan's fiction is wonderful-full of subtleties and humor and tenderness.
writing lovers blind
A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out
distance book self
…Even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between land and chart, between distances and legends, between nature and storyteller. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage, and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.
relationship book mind
In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind.
daughter eye hands
Kirpal's left hand swoops down and catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkle at the edge of his eyes behind his spectacles.
wall nurse way
He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall.
names half handwriting
A postcard. Neat handwriting fills the rectangle. Half my days I cannot bear to touch you. The rest of my time I feel like it doesn’t matter if I will ever see you again. It isn’t the morality, it’s how much you can bear. No date. No name attached.
country home sri-lanka
I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.
parent understood decided
She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he had loved her when he understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become.
country men order
The rulers of the country generally believed that betting eliminates strikes. Men had to work in order to gamble.
hands water mouths
Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.
falling-in-love smart brave-new-world
Tell me, is it possible to love someone who is not as smart as you are? ...But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? ...Why is that? 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.
laughing mud
she had a laugh that hinted it had rolled around once or twice in the mud.