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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

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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Yellow
Nurses
Bones
Crimson
Turned
Disturbed
War
Bone
Many
Uniforms
Buttons
Emotionally
Nurse
Handmaidens

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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.
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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.
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You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
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One of the things that happens in novels it's almost like a continual debate with yourself. That's why you're writing the book. It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
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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.
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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.
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Githa Hariharan's fiction is wonderful-full of subtleties and humor and tenderness.
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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.
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A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
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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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all this Beethoven and rain
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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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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.
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Half a page--and the morning is already ancient.
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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.
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There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.
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.
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Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.
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Death means you are in the third person.
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I promised to tell you how one falls in love.
Michael Ondaatje