Michael Ondaatje Country Quotations

I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.

It's an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country.

Politically I also don't believe anymore that we can only have one voice to a story, it's like having one radio station to represent a country. You want the politics of any complicated situation to be complicated in a book of fiction or nonfiction.

The rulers of the country generally believed that betting eliminates strikes. Men had to work in order to gamble.

The desert could not be claimed or owned — it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East ... All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape.

He came to this country like a torch on fire and he swallowed air as he walked forward and he gave out light

Every immigrant family, it seems, has someone who does not belong in the new country they have come to. It feels like permanent exile to that one brother or wife who cannot stand a silent fate in Boston or London or Melbourne. I’ve met many who remain haunted by the persistent ghost of an earlier place.

We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.