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A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.

Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Men
Feeds
Desert
Absence
Hold
Knowing
Water
Hands
Something
Cupped

More quotes by Michael Ondaatje

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A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
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All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
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A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out
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We keep wanting to save those who are forlorn in this world. It’s a male habit.
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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.
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Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence.
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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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There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.
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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.
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Come. We must go deeper with no justice and no jokes.
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How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.
Michael Ondaatje
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He walked out of the hospital into the sun, into open air for the first time in months, out of the green-lit rooms that lay like glass in his mind. He stood there breathing everything in, the hurry of everyone. First, he thought, I need shoes with rubber on the bottom. I need gelato.
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There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.
Michael Ondaatje
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For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.
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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.
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People don't write about kids you have to give them a lot of freedom, and that causes anarchy and that causes farce.
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There's more danger in the violence you don't face.
Michael Ondaatje
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Githa Hariharan's fiction is wonderful-full of subtleties and humor and tenderness.
Michael Ondaatje
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A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something more than water. There is a plant whose heart, if one cuts it out is replaced with fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can drink the liquid amount of the missing heart.
Michael Ondaatje
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He turns his back to the far shore and rows toward it. He can in this way travel away from, yet still see, his house....he feels he is riding a floating skeleton...Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible.
Michael Ondaatje