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We keep wanting to save those who are forlorn in this world. It’s a male habit.

Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
World
Forlorn
Wanting
Male
Males
Save
Habit
Keep

More quotes by Michael Ondaatje

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You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
Michael Ondaatje
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For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.
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As someone who writes novels that are often set in other periods of time or other ages or other landscapes, there's a certain element of research I have to do, and often, the more laconic people are, the more interesting they become.
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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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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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.
Michael Ondaatje
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I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.
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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A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
Michael Ondaatje
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I want the marginality to come into the center. This is the thing I was conscious of growing up, when I later lived in England. I saw all these war movies that came out shortly after the war, and they were all about the war being fought by Englishmen or Americans, there were no other allies in it - from India or Australia, etc.
Michael Ondaatje
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There's more danger in the violence you don't face.
Michael Ondaatje
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All I ever wanted was a world without maps.
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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Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence.
Michael Ondaatje
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This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.
Michael Ondaatje
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How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.
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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I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.
Michael Ondaatje
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she had a laugh that hinted it had rolled around once or twice in the mud.
Michael Ondaatje
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How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized
Michael Ondaatje