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The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.

Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Safely
Settled
Place
Past
Stills
Still

More quotes by Michael Ondaatje

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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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In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.
Michael Ondaatje
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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.
Michael Ondaatje
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I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.
Michael Ondaatje
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Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations.
Michael Ondaatje
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All I ever wanted was a world without maps.
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.
Michael Ondaatje
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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.
Michael Ondaatje
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A novel is a mirror walking down a road
Michael Ondaatje
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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.
Michael Ondaatje
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Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.
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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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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For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.
Michael Ondaatje
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...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.
Michael Ondaatje
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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.
Michael Ondaatje
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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.
Michael Ondaatje
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There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.
Michael Ondaatje
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Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence.
Michael Ondaatje
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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.
Michael Ondaatje