Michael Ondaatje Quotes

For grief is felt not so much for the want of what we have never known, as for the loss of that to which we have been long accustomed.

The songs of the dead are the lamentations of the living.

There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.

Sorrow is properly that state of the mind in which our desires are fixed upon the past without looking forward to the future.

You left ground and sky weeping, mind and soul full of grief. No one can take your place in existence or in absence.

Oh, my Margaret--my Margaret! no one can tell what you are to me! Dead--cold as you lie there you are the only woman I ever loved! Oh, Margaret--Margaret!

My beautiful wife is dead. She meant everything to me. Her laughter, her tears and her joy will remain with me the rest of my life.

Do not weep for me.

I just can't think how I would go on without children having lost Edith already... It's too upsetting for me to write about them. Naturally, I still hope, and wait, wait, wait.

If you lose a parent, it never goes away. As a kid, I dreamed about my father coming back for 15 or 20 years. I still do sometimes.

We live in grief for having left the womb, for having left the teat, then school, then home. In my case, it was leaving marriages, and the death of my wife.

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget: but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude.

Too many people I've loved dearly have left this earth. And some I've lost are still here breathing the same air. That grief can be comparable if not worse in its consumption.

When you love someone, and you've lost that one, then nothing really matters.

I can't bear it that Douglas isn't still here.

I am tired of losing people.

My wife was an amazing, amazing person. Sophia's Heart is an organization that I founded in honor of my wife when she passed away. When she passed away it was a complete shock, and it was disappointment, anger. I felt all those emotions.

The death of a beloved is an amputation.

Sometimes you cry, Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.

A thought Of that late death took all my heart for speech.

Everyone I have lost in the closing of a door the click of the lock is not forgotten, they do not die but remain within the soft edges of the earth, the ash of house fires and cancer in sin and forgiveness huddled under old blankets dreaming their way into my hands, my heart closing tight like fists. - "Indian Boy Love Song #1

It is said that mourning, by its gradual labour, slowly erases pain; I could not, I cannot believe this; because for me, Time eliminates the emotion of loss (I do note weep), that is all. For the rest, everything has remained motionless. For what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable.

If you no longer live, if you my beloved, my love, if you have died, all the leaves will fall in my breast, it will rain in my soul night and day, the snow will burn my heart, I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow, my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, but I shall live

Come all ye that pass by, and see if there is any sorrow like unto my sorrow.

How futile are words in the ears of those who mourn.