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Quote by Michael Ondaatje

“You built your walls too, she tells him. So I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he cannot stand. She with her beautiful clothes with her pale face that laughs at everyone who smiles at her.”

Quote by Michael Ondaatje

Author

Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje, born on September 12, 1943, is a renowned Canadian novelist. His works are known for their unique narrative style and profound emotional expression, with notable titles including 'In the Skin of a Lion' and 'The English Patient'. more

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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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Book:The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

“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.”

Knows World Stills Real Romance Order Quality Youth Wounds Compromise Mortals Ease Openness Real World

Book:The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

“You think that you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something, you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you.... I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.”

Ifs Thinking Stills Sometimes Character Would Be Moving Left Rooms Failing Betrayal Breakup Inches Retreat Break Up Never Change

Author:Michael Ondaatje

“She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he had loved her when he understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become.”

Parent Products Understood Decided

Book:The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

“It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.”

Country Enough Would Be Judging Bases Unions Soviet Twelve Soviet Union Versus Exile Jury

Book:Joseph Brodsky: Conversations

Source: Joseph Brodsky: Conversations

“She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.”

Reason Wanted Grew Shapes Grew Up Clarity

Author:Michael Ondaatje

“…Even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between land and chart, between distances and legends, between nature and storyteller. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage, and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.”

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Author:Michael Ondaatje

“I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently…but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.”

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Author:Michael Ondaatje

“She is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now, that only she can recognize in a mirror. Ideal and idealistic in that shiny dark hair! People fall in love with her. She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life.”

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Author:Michael Ondaatje

“I’ll admit that my garden now grows hope in lavish profusion, leaving little room for anything else. I suppose it has squeezed out more practical plants like caution and common sense. Still, though, hope does not flourish in every garden, and I feel thankful it has taken root in mine.”

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Book:The Reckoning

Source: The Reckoning