Michael Ondaatje Quotes

Tears hinder sorrow from becoming despair.

Certain realities in life are only seen through eyes that are cleansed through our tears. Let us learn how to weep

Here my tears are falling, Nastenka. Let them flow, let them flow - they don't hurt anybody. They will dry Nastenka.

They who are sad find somehow sweetness in tears.

Delicious tears! The heart's own dew.

Crying is cleansing. There's a reason for tears, happiness or sadness.

Nothing dries sooner than a tear.

Tears are the showers that fertilize this world.

Tears are at times as eloquent as words. [Weeping hath a voice.]

There is a certain pleasure in weeping.

I will not say, do not weep, for not all tears are an evil.

I cried until my eyes swelled shut, and then I slept, a black, dreamless sleep from which I awoke amazingly refreshed, at least until I remembered.

For women's tears are but the sweat of eyes.

It's good to actually cry. Trust me, I've had a lot of practice over the years!

I cry all the time. Music makes me cry.

Certainly tears are given to us to use. Like all good gifts, they should be used properly.

For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.

Sometimes, when you’re sad you don’t know what to do, it helps to be angry. But then the tears come back again all the same, and you fall asleep with the salty taste of them on your lips.

To weep is to make less the depth of grief.

In rising sighs and falling tears.

My tears simply broke through the fragile wallthat had held them, and with a terrible feeling of shame, I laid my head upon the table and let them drain out of me.

We need never be ashamed of our tears.

I haven't cried since Mom died. I mean, after something like that, what's left to cry about, right? But I let myself cry now. Loss is loss. Doesn't take death to create it. (266)

Recording happiness made it last longer, we felt, and recording sorrow dramatized it and took away its bitterness; and often we settled some problem which beset us even while we wrote about it.