Quote

There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You will find in this way the path of your life.

Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Find
Test
Way
Ahead
Carapace
Always
Discover
Attach
Life
Tests
Barely
Path
Contain
Story
Gradually
Stories
Existing
Character
Feed

More quotes by Michael Ondaatje

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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.
Michael Ondaatje
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Half a page--and the morning is already ancient.
Michael Ondaatje
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When I write my novels I don't really have a huge plan beforehand I don't have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it.
Michael Ondaatje
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I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.
Michael Ondaatje
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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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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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Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.
Michael Ondaatje
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As someone who writes novels that are often set in other periods of time or other ages or other landscapes, there's a certain element of research I have to do, and often, the more laconic people are, the more interesting they become.
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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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
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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.
Michael Ondaatje
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So we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement.
Michael Ondaatje
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To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.
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
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There's more danger in the violence you don't face.
Michael Ondaatje
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There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.
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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The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.
Michael Ondaatje
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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.
Michael Ondaatje
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He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall.
Michael Ondaatje