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.
long forgiving desire
Don't we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it...There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language.
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.
dog forget-everything borders
Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. 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 we cross.
music night darkness
What night gave Rafael was a formlessness in which everything had a purpose. As if darkness had a hidden musical language.
whole-life whole
How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized
music song journey
If any of you on your journeys see her-shout to me, whistle...he sang, and it became a habit for audiences to shout and whistle in response to those lines. There was nowhere he could hide in such a song that had all of its doors and windows open, so that he could walk out of it artlessly, the antiphonal responses blending with him as if he were no longer on stage.
long too-much teach
I have to teach myself not to read too much into everything. It comes from too long having to read into hardly anything at all.
night hands new-orleans
You can see that the care he took defiling the beauty he had forced in them was as precise and clean as his good hands which at night had developed the negatives, floating the sheets in the correct acids and watching the faces and breasts and pubic triangles and sofas emerge. The making and destroying coming from the same source, same lust, same surgery his brain was capable of. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)
dangerous wrong-time
Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.