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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
Many
Uniforms
Buttons
Emotionally
Nurse
Handmaidens
Yellow
Nurses
Bones
Crimson
Turned
Disturbed
War
Bone

More quotes by 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.
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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'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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She had always wanted words, she loved them grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.
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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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We keep wanting to save those who are forlorn in this world. It’s a male habit.
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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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How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized
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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.
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That's one of the great sadnesses of any life - knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.
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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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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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The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.
Michael Ondaatje
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Death means you are in the third person.
Michael Ondaatje
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Githa Hariharan's fiction is wonderful-full of subtleties and humor and tenderness.
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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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I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.
Michael Ondaatje
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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.
Michael Ondaatje
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This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.
Michael Ondaatje
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Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet.
Michael Ondaatje