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all this Beethoven and rain

Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Beethoven
Rain

More quotes by Michael Ondaatje

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What he would say, he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.
Michael Ondaatje
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A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something more than water. There is a plant whose heart, if one cuts it out is replaced with fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can drink the liquid amount of the missing heart.
Michael Ondaatje
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Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.
Michael Ondaatje
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What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.
Michael Ondaatje
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...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.
Michael Ondaatje
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Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.
Michael Ondaatje
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It's an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country.
Michael Ondaatje
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I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.
Michael Ondaatje
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There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.
Michael Ondaatje
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For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.
Michael Ondaatje
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To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.
Michael Ondaatje
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A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.
Michael Ondaatje
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It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
Michael Ondaatje
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I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.
Michael Ondaatje
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Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet.
Michael Ondaatje
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Politically I 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.
Michael Ondaatje
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Fathers die.You keep on loving them in any way you can.You can't hide him away in your heart.
Michael Ondaatje
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Sadness is very close to hate.
Michael Ondaatje
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In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.
Michael Ondaatje
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She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.
Michael Ondaatje