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He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall.

Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Somehow
Continue
Accept
Losing
Wall
Accepting
Hold
Nurse
Way
Held

More quotes by Michael Ondaatje

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Don't we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it...There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language.
Michael Ondaatje
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There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You will find in this way the path of your life.
Michael Ondaatje
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I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.
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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There always should be something hanging unfinished before a scene ends so that there's a reason for going to the next scene.
Michael Ondaatje
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People don't write about kids you have to give them a lot of freedom, and that causes anarchy and that causes farce.
Michael Ondaatje
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A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out
Michael Ondaatje
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I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.
Michael Ondaatje
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Githa Hariharan's fiction is wonderful-full of subtleties and humor and tenderness.
Michael Ondaatje
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How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized
Michael Ondaatje
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all this Beethoven and rain
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 think precision in writing goes hand in hand with not trying to say everything. You try and say two-thirds, so the reader will involve himself or herself.
Michael Ondaatje
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Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.
Michael Ondaatje
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If you look at Japanese film, it is made up of collage or bricolage, it is made up of lists, and suddenly when you stand back from the lists you begin to see the pattern of a life.
Michael Ondaatje
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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.
Michael Ondaatje
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There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.
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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Snap. Lady with dog. Lady on sofa half-naked. Snap. Naked lady. Lady next to dresser. Lady at window. Snap. Lady on balcony sunlight. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)
Michael Ondaatje
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We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.
Michael Ondaatje