Michael Ondaatje Quotes

The people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping...something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come on to the scene.

We can't all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.

The thing that is always important to me is the relationships. I feel like until I get around with the actual people that I am going to be working with there is only so much that I can do.

I just love drama. I love the idea of exploring relationships, whatever they may be. That's fun for me.

People drive everywhere in L.A., so you get very little human interaction... but N.Y. and Chicago are like London... L.A. lacks the social interaction.

In Toronto, I grew up taking a subway, I grew up taking a bus. I spent my formative adult years in New York City, walking the streets, taking the subway. You're connected to the larger whole. L.A. is so spread out, and you're so incubated inside those cars and it's so exhausting to deal with the traffic, without really having the human contact.

Whereas the Bedouin who survey 100 miles of empty sand and crave company and can psychologically afford to offer each stranger a warm welcome, his urban contemporaries, at heart no less well-meaning or generous, must in order to preserve a modicum of balance, live without any acknowledgement of the millions of human beings sleeping arguing. Copulating, and dying only inches away. Modern society does not help us to put forward our more dignified side.

I've played real people before, but I never knew them.

When you go to the big city - you're in New York, Boston, you're in L.A. - you walk in the streets, and nobody says anything to you. It becomes so impersonal because there's so many people.

I don't like being in London too long, because everybody's just looking straight forward, at nobody else. That freaks me out a little bit.

London and its people are famed for their incredible indifference to one another, but it's actually a charade that requires some effort to maintain.

New York is so unique, and you are not always encouraged to consider the people in the city your neighbors because of the fast pace and surface anonymity.

Welcome to New York, where everybody's a stranger, and nobody is.

In a social environment that is ever crowded and impersonal, it is becoming increasingly important to reconsider the value of close personal relationships before we are driven to ask the forlorn question, 'Whatever happened to love?'

I have people in my life, of course. Some write; some don't. Some read; some don't. Some stare vacantly into space when I talk the geeky talk and walk the geeky walk, but they make killer chocolate chip pancakes and so all is forgiven.

The doctors are all agreed that I am suffering for want of society. Was never a case like it. First, I did not know that I was suffering at all. Secondly, as an Irishman might say, I had thought it was indigestion of the society I got.

Sometimes chemistry does the trick, and other times, you have to forge that with the people.

The city's full of people who you just see around.

I say everything's about company. A gourmet meal with an asshole is a horrible meal. A hot dog with an interesting person is an amazing meal.

One would be in less danger From the wiles of the stranger If one's own kin and kith Were more fun to be with.

Women age more in company because they have more relationships. Men have buddies. They have acquaintances, they have comrades. Friends as women have, the friends that of the soul that you share everything, that you witness each other's lives, that you talk their, your, heart out, that you cry with, that you ask money when you need, that.

In great cities men are more callous both to the happiness and the misery of others, than in the country; for they are constantly in the habit of seeing both extremes.

Life is not all high emotion. Some of the most interesting things are when its not highly emotional: little details of relationships and body language.

They're sort of ancillary anyway, friends. I mean, they're important -- everybody knows that; the TV tells you so -- but they come and go. You lose one friend, you pick up another.

The anonymity of the city is one of its strengths as well as - carried too far - one of its weaknesses.