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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.

Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Others
Borders
Even
Hidden
Every
Cross
Crosses
Presence
Rest
Briefly
Known
Contain
Lives
Border

More quotes by Michael Ondaatje

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Sadness is very close to hate.
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It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.
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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.
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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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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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All I ever wanted was a world without maps.
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A novel is a mirror walking down a road
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That's one of the great sadnesses of any life - knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.
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As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.
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The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion
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There's more danger in the violence you don't face.
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A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out
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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.
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All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
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The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.
Michael Ondaatje
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I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.
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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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I promised to tell you how one falls in love.
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What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.
Michael Ondaatje
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I want to die on your chest but not yet she wrote sometime in the 13th century of our love
Michael Ondaatje