Michael Ondaatje Quotes

What makes men indifferent to their wives is that they can see them when they please.

Have you noticed how nobody ever looks up? Nobody looks at chimneys, or trees against the sky, or the tops of buildings. Everybody just looks down at the pavement or their shoes. The whole world could pass them by and most people wouldn't notice.

One response was given by the innkeeper when Mary and Joseph wanted to find a room where the Child could be born. The innkeeper was not hostile; he was not opposed to them, but his inn was crowded; his hands were full; his mind was preoccupied. This is the answer that millions are giving today. Like a Bethlehem innkeeper, they cannot find room for Christ. All the accommodations in their hearts are already taken up by other crowding interests. Their response is not atheism. It is not defiance. It is preoccupation and the feeling of being able to get on reasonably well without Christianity.

I will do as I usually do. Tomorrow is going to be a day like any other day.

I like to read in my own house, in any of the rooms I always mean to paint or otherwise improve and never do. Every detail is so familiar to me that it makes almost no claim on my attention.

I've spent several years now with my head down.

The more often we see the things around us - even the beautiful and wonderful things - the more they become invisible to us. That is why we often take for granted the beauty of this world: the flowers, the trees, the birds, the clouds - even those we love. Because we see things so often, we see them less and less.

You do not notice changes in what is always before you.

I am someone who doesn't pay so much attention to how I am looking. I get so involved in what I am doing, so I overlook that.

When you do anything for eight or nine years, you start getting a little comfortable; you start taking things for granted.

I don't get hyped when I see stars now because it's like second nature to me.

I've been at Stoke for eight years... I think I've had the same towel for almost eight years.

I don't go to rock bars. Why would I go to rock bars? I can do that every night; it's boring.

When something is working well, it becomes too easy to let things run themselves.

I've been here for 19 years, so West Ham fans are bored with seeing me. It's like my wife, who changes the wallpaper every three years because she gets tired of it.

Usually, I'm so self-absorbed that my companion could be bleeding to death, and I might not notice.

A man may take care of a furnace for twenty-five years and still forget to duck his head when he starts going down the cellar stairs.

Not listening is probably the commonest unkindness of married life, and one that creates - more devastatingly than an eternity of forgotten birthdays and misguided Christmas gifts - an atmosphere of not loving and not caring.

Most of us fall short much more by omission than by commission. While the world perishes we go our way: purposeless, passionless, day after day.

A single sentence will suffice for modern man. He fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.

Like all familiar objects, it had become invisible.

Were the stars out when I left the house last evening? All I could remember was the couple in the Skyline listening to Duran Duran. Stars? Who remembers stars? Come to think of it, had I even looked up at the sky recently? Had the stars been wiped out of the sky three months ago, I wouldn’t have known.

The mind becomes accustomed to things by the habitual sight of them, and neither wonders nor inquires about the reasons for things it sees all the time.

When we have an experience -- hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room -- on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage

How quickly do we grow accustomed to wonders. I am reminded of the Isaac Asimov story Nightfall, about the planet where the stars were visible only once in a thousand years. So awesome was the sight that it drove men mad. We who can see the stars every night glance up casually at the cosmos and then quickly down again, searching for a Dairy Queen.