Michael Ondaatje Quotes

Humour and high seriousness... Perfect bedfellows, I think. Though I usually phrase it in terms of comedy and darkness. Comedy without darkness rapidly becomes trivial. And darkness without comedy rapidly becomes unbearable.

There's a fine line between comedy and the darkest place ever.

When my son was murdered, people asked me how I felt about God and what had happened to my son. I said, 'No, you can't go there. You have to understand that there is a devil, and he works 24/7. Whoever murdered our son was with the devil.'

We are not here to laugh.

There's so much absurdity. Poverty is so absurd.

For we went, changing our country more often than our shoes In the class war, despairing When there was only injustice and no resistance

A point concerning property, which ought, for the reasons I have just mentioned, to be most speedily decided, frequently exercises the wit of successions of lawyers, for many generations .… But the question concerning a man’s life, that great question in which no delay ought to be counted tedious, is commonly determined in twenty-four hours at the utmost. It is not to be wondered at that injustice and absurdity should be inseparable companions.

Who gives a fuck if he's lonely and depressed down there in San Clemente? If there were any such thing as true justice in this world, his rancid carcass would be somewhere down around Easter Island right now, in the belly of a hammerhead shark.

That's what 'Hell On Earth' was about: we felt that we were living in hell.

Life is a jest of the Gods and there is no justice. You must learn to laugh… or else you'll weep yourself to death.

When you cannot joke about the darkness of life, that’s when the darkness takes over.

If the whole world is evil, then the tragedy that befell you is justified," she went on. "That would make it easier for you to accept the deaths of your wife and daughters. But if good people do exist, then, however much you deny it, your life will be unbearable; because fate set a trap for you, and you know you didn't deserve it. It isn't the light you want to recover, it's the certainty that there is only darkness.

Let's face it: the world is twisted. And rotten.

When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in.

Hell is the impossibility of reason.

As I like to say to the people in Montgomery: "The tension in this city is not between white people and Negro people. The tension is, at bottom, between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.

They all deserve to die. Even you, Mrs. Lovett Even I. Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief For the rest of us death would be relief.

If everyone is mature, there is no comedy.

Were't not for laughing, I should pity him.

Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else.

The hope of all who suffer, The dread of all who wrong.

Justice is a fading light.

Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.

If there is wrong, you don't say we have to get rid of it gradually. If injustice exists, you need to eliminate it immediately.

I'm not going to be remotely funny.