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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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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Important
Large
Thing
Personal
Would
Small
Came
Interesting
Involvement
Understand
Strangers
Lives
Stranger
Without
Pass

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A novel is a mirror walking down a road
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Sadness is very close to hate.
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In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.
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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.
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All I ever wanted was a world without maps.
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What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.
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How we are almost nothing. We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of the draw, with little choice or determination on our part.
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The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.
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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)
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I want to die on your chest but not yet she wrote sometime in the 13th century of our love
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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.
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This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.
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Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.
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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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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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