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

More quotes by 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.
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The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.
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Fathers die.You keep on loving them in any way you can.You can't hide him away in your heart.
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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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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.
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Nicholas Temelcoff is famous on the bridge, a daredevil. He is given all the difficult jobs and he takes them. He descends into the air with no fear. He is a solitary. He assembles ropes, brushes the tackle and pulley at his waist, and falls off the bridge like a diver over the edge of a boat.
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It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
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I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.
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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.
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Death means you are in the third person.
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A novel is a mirror walking down a road
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I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.
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The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat.
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I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.
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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What he would say, he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.
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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.
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She had always wanted words, she loved them grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.
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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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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