Quote

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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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Make
Shapes
Kings
Parading
Room
Anonymous
Rooms
Rebirth
Alone
Unknown
White
Corners
History
Shape
Something
King

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all this Beethoven and rain
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A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
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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.
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Sadness is very close to hate.
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It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
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As someone who writes novels that are often set in other periods of time or other ages or other landscapes, there's a certain element of research I have to do, and often, the more laconic people are, the more interesting they become.
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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.
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All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
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There's more danger in the violence you don't face.
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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.
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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.
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There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.
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A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out
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I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.
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This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.
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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.
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There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.
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Tell me, is it possible to love someone who is not as smart as you are? ...But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? ...Why is that? Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.
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The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.
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