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We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.
Michael Ondaatje
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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Untie
Knot
Knots
Loss
Wish
Heart
Love
More quotes by Michael Ondaatje
I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.
Michael Ondaatje
For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.
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It's an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country.
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He walked out of the hospital into the sun, into open air for the first time in months, out of the green-lit rooms that lay like glass in his mind. He stood there breathing everything in, the hurry of everyone. First, he thought, I need shoes with rubber on the bottom. I need gelato.
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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
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.
Michael Ondaatje
In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.
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So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.
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Come. We must go deeper with no justice and no jokes.
Michael Ondaatje
A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out
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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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What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.
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One of the things that happens in novels it's almost like a continual debate with yourself. That's why you're writing the book. It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
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Death means you are in the third person.
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There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.
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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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You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.
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Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.
Michael Ondaatje
Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence.
Michael Ondaatje
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
