Michael Ondaatje Quotes

In my work, I'm called to a job at the drop of a hat, so I like a sense of order to my holidays, and holding a map makes me happy.

People seem to be looking for discipline in a topsy-turvy world.

No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.

We're lost, but we're making good time.

We're dealing with the chaos of life, and we're rubbing it down. The deeper you rub, the more patterns you can see until you realize that it's really an organized chaos. There isn't really ever any chance to understand it all, but we're here to keep rubbing.

It was like looking at a knot, knowing it was a knot, but not knowing how to untie it. I had no map for this life.

We were just looking at maps.

The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. They cannot find for us the way again.

I’m interested in what people do with the chaos in their lives and how they respond to it, and simultaneously what they do with what they feel like are limitations. If they push against these limitations, will they wind up in the realm of chaos, or will they push against limitations and wind up in the world of freedom?

Now that I've found the way to fly, which direction should I go into the night?

... I love walking my feet off. Gimme a map and a box of Band-Aids and I'm all set!

I don't think I had even begun to have an idea where I was going, but wherever it was, that was where I wanted to go.

The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All round its cramped margins lies the gulf.

I know one thing for certain; it is much harder to tell whether you are lost than whether you were lost, for, on many occasions, where you are going is exactly where you are. On the other hand, if you often find that where you've been is not at all where you should have gone, and, since it's much more difficult to find your way back from someplace you've never left, I suggest you go there immediately and then decide.

I don't know why it's called "getting lost." Even when you turn down the wrong street, when you find yourself at the dead end of a chain-link fence or a road that turnd to sand, you are somewhere. It just isn't where you expected to be.

Freedom without structure is its own slavery.

Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.

I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.

Freedom is not a license for chaos.

It is possible I never learned the names of birds in order to discover the bird of peace, the bird of paradise, the bird of the soul, the bird of desire. It is possible I avoided learning the names of composers and their music the better to close my eyes and listen to the mystery of all music as an ocean. It may be I have not learned dates in history in order to reach the essence of timelessness. It may be I never learned geography the better to map my own routes and discover my own lands. The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress.

We're right here on this very spot. Besides, being lost is never a matter of not knowing where you are; it's a matter of not knowing where you aren't - and I don't care at all about where I'm not.

Before abstraction everything is one, but one like chaos; after abstraction everything is united again, but this union is a free binding of autonomous, self-determined beings. Out of a mob a society has developed, chaos has been transformed into a manifold world.

One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going.