Michael Ondaatje Quotes About Character

Quotes about: Character

• There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You will find in this way the path of your life.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Character, Stories, Tests

• 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

• You think that you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something, you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you.... I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Break Up, Breakup, Betrayal

• when someone speaks he looks at a mouth, not eyes and their colors, which, it seems to him, will always alter depending on the light of a room, the minute of the day. Mouths reveal insecurity or smugness or any other point on the spectrum of character. For him they are the most intricate aspect of faces. He's never sure what an eye reveals. but he can read how mouths darken into callousness, suggest tenderness. One can often misjudge an eye from its reaction to a simple beam of sunlight.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Character, Eye, Simple

• She moved from being a young woman into having the angular look of a queen, someone who has made her face with her desire to be a certain kind of person. He still likes that about her. Her smartness, the fact that she did not inherit that look or that beauty, but it was something searched for and that it will always reflect a present stage of her character.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Queens, Character, Desire

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

• It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Character, Arguing

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