Michael Ondaatje Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Relationship, Believe, Book

  FaceBook post by Michael Ondaatje from Nov 01, 2015

• One of the things that happens in novels it's almost like a continual debate with yourself. That's why you're writing the book. It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Book, Character, Writing

• It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Book, Writing, Discovery

• 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.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Romantic, Book, Reflection

  Michael Ondaatje (2007). “Vintage Ondaatje”, p.117, Vintage

• And it would be a spare life he would be certain to lead as a schoolteacher in some urban location. But he had a serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live. And this serenity and certainty I have seen only among those who have the armour of books close by.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Book, Choices, Serenity

• In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Relationship, Book, Mind

• This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Book, Doors, Cells

  FaceBook post by Michael Ondaatje from Sep 17, 2014

• I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. ... All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Believe, Book, Men

  Michael Ondaatje (1996). “The English Patient: A Novel”, Random House Inglaterra

• So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Book, Night, Missing

  Michael Ondaatje (2011). “The English Patient”, p.7, Vintage

• …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.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Distance, Book, Land

• ... the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Book, Wind, Desert

  Michael Ondaatje (2011). “The English Patient”, p.261, Vintage

• You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Lying, Book, Stones

  Michael Ondaatje (2011). “The English Patient”, p.253, Vintage

• The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Book, Three, Lasts

• Politically I also don't believe anymore that we can only have one voice to a story, it's like having one radio station to represent a country. You want the politics of any complicated situation to be complicated in a book of fiction or nonfiction.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Country, Believe, Book

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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