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A novel is a mirror walking down a road

Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Mirror
Mirrors
Road
Walking
Novel

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Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence.
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There was always, he thought, this pleasure ahead of him, an ace of joy up his sleeve so he could say you can do anything to me, take everything away, put me in prison, but I will know [her] when we are old.
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She had always wanted words, she loved them grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.
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How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.
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There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.
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all this Beethoven and rain
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Come. We must go deeper with no justice and no jokes.
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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.
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In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.
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I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.
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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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Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.
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It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.
Michael Ondaatje
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A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out
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Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.
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All I ever wanted was a world without maps.
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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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There's more danger in the violence you don't face.
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The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.
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I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently…but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.
Michael Ondaatje