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
wall fall grief
I am someone who has a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in place, and it will not fall.
kings white shapes
Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.
echoes glasses childhood
For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.
love-is use
Love is the use one makes of another.
has-beens ifs
He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?
romantic book reflection
Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.
whole-life whole
How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized
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.
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.
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.
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.
maps earth cartography
All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
falling-in-love fall
I promised to tell you how one falls in love.
wall hands people
Some people you just had to embrace, in some way or another, had to bite into the muscle, to remain sane in their company. You needed to grab their hand and clutch it like a downer so they would pull you into their midst. Otherwise they, walking casually down the street towards you, almost about to wave, would leap over a wall and be gone for months.