Quote

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.

Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Think
Tell
Smart
Thinking
Order
Direct
Seduce
World
Someone
Pieces
Seducing
Change
Grow
Talkers
Anything
Grows
Smarter
Important
Possible
Corners
Things
Words
Fit
Love
Fall
Brave

More quotes by Michael Ondaatje

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It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.
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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I promised to tell you how one falls in love.
Michael Ondaatje
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I am someone who has a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in place, and it will not fall.
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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A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
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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Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.
Michael Ondaatje
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To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.
Michael Ondaatje
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It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
Michael Ondaatje
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Women want everything of a lover. And too often I would sink below the surface. So armies disappear under sand. And there was her fear of her husband, her belief in her honour, my old desire for self-sufficiency, my disappearances, her suspicions of me, my disbelief that she loved me. The paranoia and claustrophobia of hidden love.
Michael Ondaatje
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A novel is a mirror walking down a road
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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He was a man who wrote, who interpreted the world. Wisdom grew out of being handed just the smallest sliver of emotion. A glance could lead to paragraphs of theory.
Michael Ondaatje
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Nicholas Temelcoff is famous on the bridge, a daredevil. He is given all the difficult jobs and he takes them. He descends into the air with no fear. He is a solitary. He assembles ropes, brushes the tackle and pulley at his waist, and falls off the bridge like a diver over the edge of a boat.
Michael Ondaatje
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All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
Michael Ondaatje
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So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.
Michael Ondaatje
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You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
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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I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.
Michael Ondaatje