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There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.

Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Anger
Dance
Emotion
Literature
Making
Music
Always

More quotes by 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.
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Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence.
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A novel is a mirror walking down a road
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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.
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All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
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He was a man who wrote, who interpreted the world. Wisdom grew out of being handed just the smallest sliver of emotion. A glance could lead to paragraphs of theory.
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Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.
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I think precision in writing goes hand in hand with not trying to say everything. You try and say two-thirds, so the reader will involve himself or herself.
Michael Ondaatje
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It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.
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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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I promised to tell you how one falls in love.
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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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I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.
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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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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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A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
Michael Ondaatje
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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.
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It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.
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What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.
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