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How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.

Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Doe
Love
Happen
Fall
Happens

More quotes by Michael Ondaatje

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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.
Michael Ondaatje
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I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.
Michael Ondaatje
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Snap. Lady with dog. Lady on sofa half-naked. Snap. Naked lady. Lady next to dresser. Lady at window. Snap. Lady on balcony sunlight. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)
Michael Ondaatje
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Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.
Michael Ondaatje
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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.
Michael Ondaatje
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The music of Gavin Bryars falls under no category. It is mongrel, full of sensuality and wit and is deeply moving. He is one of the few composers who can put slapstick and primal emotion alongside each other. He allows you to witness new wonders in the sounds around you by approaching them from a completely new angle. With a third ear maybe.
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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I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.
Michael Ondaatje
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Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet.
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.
Michael Ondaatje
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I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.
Michael Ondaatje
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Could you fall in love with her if she wasn't smarter than you? I mean, she may not be smarter than you. But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? Think now.
Michael Ondaatje
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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.
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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I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.
Michael Ondaatje
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all this Beethoven and rain
Michael Ondaatje
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Death means you are in the third person.
Michael Ondaatje
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The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.
Michael Ondaatje
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How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized
Michael Ondaatje
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You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
Michael Ondaatje