Quote

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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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Lying
Creature
Loch
Read
Shot
Morphine
Book
Shots
Vegetation
Must
Stones
Corridors
Something
Creatures
Loose
Lies
Deceit
Full
Tempted
Talk
Pockets
Caravaggio

More quotes by Michael Ondaatje

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How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.
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Politically I also don't believe anymore that we can only have one voice to a story, it's like having one radio station to represent a country. You want the politics of any complicated situation to be complicated in a book of fiction or nonfiction.
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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.
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I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.
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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Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence.
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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How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized
Michael Ondaatje
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I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.
Michael Ondaatje
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The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.
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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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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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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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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If you look at Japanese film, it is made up of collage or bricolage, it is made up of lists, and suddenly when you stand back from the lists you begin to see the pattern of a life.
Michael Ondaatje
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Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet.
Michael Ondaatje
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In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.
Michael Ondaatje
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To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.
Michael Ondaatje
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Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.
Michael Ondaatje
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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.
Michael Ondaatje