Michael Ondaatje Quotes About Birds

Quotes about: Birds

• Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Girl, Fall, Believe

  Michael Ondaatje (2011). “The English Patient”, p.94, Vintage

• She had lived in that house fourteen years, and every year she had demanded of John that she be given a pet of some strange exotic breed. Not that she did not have enough animals. She had collected several wild and broken animals that, in a way, had become exotic by their breaking. Their roof would have collapsed from the number of birds who might have lived there if the desert hadn't killed three- quarters of those that tried to cross it. Still every animal that came within a certain radius of that house was given a welcome-the tame, the half born, the wild, the wounded.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Animal, Years, Numbers

  Michael Ondaatje (2011). “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid”, p.35, Vintage

• Between the kitchen and the destroyed chapel a door led into an oval-shaped library. The space inside seemed safe except for a large hole at portrait level in the far wall, caused by mortar-shell attack on the villa two months earlier. The rest of the room had adapted itself to this wound, accepting the habits of weather, evening stars, the sound of birds.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Stars, Wall, Doors

  Michael Ondaatje (2011). “The English Patient”, p.12, A&C Black

• He turns his back to the far shore and rows toward it. He can in this way travel away from, yet still see, his house....he feels he is riding a floating skeleton...Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Dark, Reflection, Skeletons

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