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He Walked Out Of The Hospital Into The Sun, Into Open Air For The First Time In Months, Out Of The Green-lit Rooms That Lay Like Glass In His Mind. He Stood There Breathing Everything In, The Hurry Of Everyone. First, He Thought, I Need Shoes With Rubber On The Bottom. I Need Gelato.

-Michael Ondaatje

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He Walked Out Of

Michael Ondaatje

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He Walked Out Of The Hospital Into The Sun, Into Open Air For The First Time In Months, Out Of The Green-lit Rooms That Lay Like Glass In His Mind. He Stood There Breathing Everything In, The Hurry Of Everyone. First, He Thought, I Need Shoes With Rubber On The Bottom. I Need Gelato.

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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.

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Some People You Just Had To Embrace, In Some Way Or Another, Had To Bite Into The Muscle, To Remain Sane In Their Company. You Needed To Grab Their Hair And Clutch It Like A Drowner So They Would Pull You Into Their Midst. Otherwise They, Walking Casually Down The Street Towards You, Almost About To Wave, Would Leap Over A Wall And Be Gone For Months.

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When I Write My Novels I Don't Really Have A Huge Plan Beforehand; I Don't Have The Whole Plot And Architecture, So The Story Is Sort Of Discovered As I Write It.

She Had A Laugh That Hinted It Had Rolled Around Once Or Twice In The Mud.

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Why Are You Not Smarter? It's Only The Rich Who Can't Afford To Be Smart. They're Compromised. They Got Locked Years Ago Into Privilege. They Have To Protect Their Belongings. No One Is Meaner Than The Rich. Trust Me. But They Have To Follow The Rules Of Their Shitty Civilised World. They Declare War, They Have Honour, And They Can't Leave. But You Two. We Three. We're Free.

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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.

...sometimes We Enter Art To Hide Within It. It Is Where We Can Go To Save Ourselves, Where A Third-person Voice Protects Us.

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The Trouble With All Of Us Is We Are Where We Shouldn't Be.

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It's A Responsibility Of The Writer To Get The Reader Out Of The Story Somehow.

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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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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.

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I'll Be Looking At The Moon, But I'll Be Seeing You.

I Am Not In Love With Him, I Am In Love With Ghosts. So Is He, He's In Love With Ghosts.

She Had Lived In That House Fourteen Years, And Every Year She Had Demanded Of John That She Be Given A Pet Of Some Strange Exotic Breed. Not That She Did Not Have Enough Animals. She Had Collected Several Wild And Broken Animals That, In A Way, Had Become Exotic By Their Breaking. Their Roof Would Have Collapsed From The Number Of Birds Who Might Have Lived There If The Desert Hadn't Killed Three- Quarters Of Those That Tried To Cross It. Still Every Animal That Came Within A Certain Radius Of That House Was Given A Welcome-the Tame, The Half Born, The Wild, The Wounded.

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I Thought I Was Being Loved Because I Was Being Altered.

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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.

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It Doubles Your Perception, To Write From The Point Of View Of Someone You're Not.

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There Was Always, He Thought, This Pleasure Ahead Of Him, An Ace Of Joy Up His Sleeve So He Could Say You Can Do Anything To Me, Take Everything Away, Put Me In Prison, But I Will Know [her] When We Are Old.

He Will Hear The Rain Before He Feels It, A Clicking On The Dry Grass, On The Olive Leaves.

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I Tend Not To Know What The Plot Is Or The Story Is Or Even The Theme. Those Things Come Later, For Me.

He Walked Out Of The Hospital Into The Sun, Into Open Air For The First Time In Months, Out Of The Green-lit Rooms That Lay Like Glass In His Mind. He Stood There Breathing Everything In, The Hurry Of Everyone. First, He Thought, I Need Shoes With Rubber On The Bottom. I Need Gelato.

When We Are Young We Do Not Look Into Mirrors. It Is When We Are Old, Concerned With Our Name, Our Legend, What Our Lives Will Mean To The Future. We Become Vain With The Names We Own, Our Claims To Have Been The First Eyes, The Strongest Army, The Cleverest Merchant. It Is When He Is Old That Narcissus Wants A Graven Image Of Himself.

There's More Danger In The Violence You Don't Face.

Sleep Is A Prison For A Boy Who Has Friends To Meet.

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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.

Her Father Had Taught Her About Hands. About A Dog's Paws. Whenever Her Father Was Alone With A Dog In A House He Would Lean Over And Smell The Skin At The Base Of Its Paw. This, He Would Say, As If Coming Away From A Brandy Snifter, Is The Greatest Smell In The World! A Bouquet! Great Rumours Of Travel! She Would Pretend Disgust, But The Dog's Paw Was A Wonder: The Smell Of It Never Suggested Dirt. It's A Cathedral! Her Father Had Said, So-and-so's Garden, That Field Of Grasses, A Walk Through Cyclamen--a Concentration Of Hints Of All The Paths The Animal Had Taken During The Day.

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To Write About Someone Like Myself Would Be Very Limiting.

For We Live With Those Retrievals From Childhood That Coalesce And Echo Throughout Our Lives, The Way Shattered Pieces Of Glass In A Kaleidoscope Reappear In New Forms And Are Songlike In Their Refrains And Rhymes, Making Up A Single Monologue. We Live Permanently In The Recurrence Of Our Own Stories, Whatever Story We Tell.

The Desert Could Not Be Claimed Or Owned — It Was A Piece Of Cloth Carried By Winds, Never Held Down By Stones, And Given A Hundred Shifting Names Before Canterbury Existed, Long Before Battles And Treaties Quilted Europe And The East ... All Of Us, Even Those With European Homes And Children In The Distance, Wished To Remove The Clothing Of Our Countries. It Was A Place Of Faith. We Disappeared Into Landscape.

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.

It's Why You Create Characters: So You Can Argue With Yourself.

For Echo Is The Soul Of The Voice Exciting Itself In Hollow Places.

There's A Lot Of Thievery Involved In Writing. You're Breaking Into Other People's Spaces And Other People's Stories.

Sadness Is Very Close To Hate.

She Moved From Being A Young Woman Into Having The Angular Look Of A Queen, Someone Who Has Made Her Face With Her Desire To Be A Certain Kind Of Person. He Still Likes That About Her. Her Smartness, The Fact That She Did Not Inherit That Look Or That Beauty, But It Was Something Searched For And That It Will Always Reflect A Present Stage Of Her Character.

I Kind Of Was Shoveled Onto A Boat At 11 And Went To England. I Didn't Have Any Parent Watching Over Me. It Was Very Free And May Have Been A Bit Of A Scary Time For Me, But I Really Don't Remember Much About The Voyage Apart From Playing Ping-pong A Lot With A Couple Friends.

How We Are Almost Nothing. We Think, In Our Youth, We Are The Centre Of The Universe, But We Simply Respond, Go This Way Or That By Accident, Survive Or Improve By The Luck Of The Draw, With Little Choice Or Determination On Our Part.

He Turns His Back To The Far Shore And Rows Toward It. He Can In This Way Travel Away From, Yet Still See, His House....he Feels He Is Riding A Floating Skeleton...some Birds In The Almost-dark Are Flying As Close To Their Reflections As Possible.

You Want To Suggest Something New, But At The Same Time, Resolve The Drama Of The Action In The Novel.

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.

When I Read Biographies, I Skip The First Thirty Pages About The Childhood Because It Doesn't Seem Interesting To Me.

Tell Me, Is It Possible To Love Someone Who Is Not As Smart As You Are? ...but Isn't It Important For You To Think She Is Smarter Than You In Order To Fall In Love? ...why Is That? Because We Want To Know Things, How The Pieces Fit. Talkers Seduce, Words Direct Us Into Corners. We Want More Than Anything To Grow And Change. Brave New World.

Falling In Love

Brave New World

Jung Was Absolutely Right About One Thing. We Are Occupied By Gods. The Mistake Is To Identify With The God Occupying You.

I Love The Performance Of A Craft, Whether It Is Modest Or Mean-spirited, Yet I Walk Away When Discussions Of It Begin - As If One Should Ask A Gravedigger What Brand Of Shovel He Uses Or Whether He Prefers To Work At Noon Or In Moonlight. I Am Interested Only In The Care Taken, And Those Secret Rehearsals Behind It. Even If I Do Not Understand Fully What Is Taking Place.

A Novel Is A Mirror Walking Down A Road

What Is Interesting And Important Happens Mostly In Secret, In Places Where There Is No Power.

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.

... The Desert, Where There Is The Communal Book Of Moonlight. We Were Among The Rumour Of Wells. In The Palace Of Winds.

Men Had Always Been The Reciters Of Poetry In The Desert.

This Last Night We Tear Into Each Other, As If To Wound, As If To Find The Key To Everything Before Morning.

Half A Page--and The Morning Is Already Ancient.

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.

In Canada Pianos Needed Water. You Opened Up The Back And Left A Full Glass Of Water, And A Month Later The Glass Would Be Empty. Her Father Had Told Her About The Dwarfs Who Drank Only At Pianos, Never In Bars.

I See The Poem Or The Novel Ending With An Open Door.

A Blind Lover, Don't Know What I Love Till I Write It Out

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.

He Has Been Disassembled By Her. And If She Has Brought Him To This, What Has He Brought Her To?

Sometimes When She Is Able To Spend The Night With Him They Are Wakened By The Three Minarets Of The City Beginning Their Prayers Before Dawn. He Walks With Her Through The Indigo Markets That Lie Between South Cairo And Her Home. The Beautiful Songs Of Faith Enter The Air Like Arrows, One Minaret Answering Another, As If Passing On A Rumor Of The Two Of Them As They Walk Through The Cold Morning Air, The Smell Of Charcoal And Hemp Already Making The Air Profound. Sinners In A Holy City.

Could You Fall In Love With Her If She Wasn't Smarter Than You? I Mean, She May Not Be Smarter Than You. But Isn't It Important For You To Think She Is Smarter Than You In Order To Fall In Love? Think Now.

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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.

Once I've Discovered The Story, I Might Restructure It, Maybe Move Things Around, Set Up A Clue That Something Is Going To Happen Later, But That Happens Much Later In An Editorial Capacity.

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.

There Was A Time When Mapmakers Named The Places They Travelled Through With The Names Of Lovers Rather Than Their Own.

That's Anil's Path. She Grows Up In Sri Lanka, Goes And Gets Educated Abroad, And Through Fate Or Chance Gets Brought Back By The Human Rights Commission To Investigate War Crimes.

All I Desired Was To Walk Upon Such An Earth That Had No Maps.

We Own The Country We Grow Up In, Or We Are Aliens And Invaders.

Everyone Has To Scratch On Walls Somewhere Or They Go Crazy

All I Ever Wanted Was A World Without Maps.

Politically I Also Don't Believe Anymore That We Can Only Have One Voice To A Story, It's Like Having One Radio Station To Represent A Country. You Want The Politics Of Any Complicated Situation To Be Complicated In A Book Of Fiction Or Nonfiction.

You Can See That The Care He Took Defiling The Beauty He Had Forced In Them Was As Precise And Clean As His Good Hands Which At Night Had Developed The Negatives, Floating The Sheets In The Correct Acids And Watching The Faces And Breasts And Pubic Triangles And Sofas Emerge. The Making And Destroying Coming From The Same Source, Same Lust, Same Surgery His Brain Was Capable Of. (on New Orleans Photographer E. J. Bellocq)

I Don't See Novels Ending With Any Real Sense Of Closure.

We Die Containing A Richness Of Lovers And Tribes, Tastes We Have Swallowed, Bodies We Have Plunged Into And Swum Up As If Rivers Of Wisdom, Characters We Have Climbed Into As If Trees, Fears We Have Hidden In As If Caves. I Wish For All This To Be Marked On By Body When I Am Dead. I Believe In Such Cartography - To Be Marked By Nature, Not Just To Label Ourselves On A Map Like The Names Of Rich Men And Women On Buildings. We Are Communal Histories, Communal Books. We Are Not Owned Or Monogamous In Our Taste Or Experience.

Come. We Must Go Deeper With No Justice And No Jokes.

Water Is The Exile, Carried Back In Cans And Flasks, The Ghost Between Your Hands And Your Mouth.

Politically I Don't Believe Anymore That We Can Only Have One Voice To A Story, It's Like Having One Radio Station To Represent A Country.

We Are Expanded By Tears, We Are Told, Not Reduced By Them.

You Must Talk To Me, Caravaggio. Or Am I Just A Book? Something To Be Read, Some Creature To Be Tempted Out Of A Loch And Shot Full Of Morphine, Full Of Corridors, Lies, Loose Vegetation, Pockets Of Stones.

Don't We Forgive Everything Of A Lover? We Forgive Selfishness, Desire, Guile. As Long As We Are The Motive For It...there Are Some European Words You Can Never Translate Properly Into Another Language.

I'm A Canadian Citizen. But I Always Want To Feel At Home In Sri Lanka. I'm A Member Of Both Countries.

So Many Nurses Had Turned Into Emotionally Disturbed Handmaidens Of The War, In Their Yellow-and-crimson Uniforms With Bone Buttons.

Between The Kitchen And The Destroyed Chapel A Door Led Into An Oval-shaped Library. The Space Inside Seemed Safe Except For A Large Hole At Portrait Level In The Far Wall, Caused By Mortar-shell Attack On The Villa Two Months Earlier. The Rest Of The Room Had Adapted Itself To This Wound, Accepting The Habits Of Weather, Evening Stars, The Sound Of Birds.

People Don't Write About Kids; You Have To Give Them A Lot Of Freedom, And That Causes Anarchy And That Causes Farce.

Fathers Die.you Keep On Loving Them In Any Way You Can.you Can't Hide Him Away In Your Heart.

Love Is So Small It Can Tear Itself Through The Eye Of A Needle

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.

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.

Everything Is Biographical, Lucian Freud Says. What We Make, Why It Is Made, How We Draw A Dog, Who It Is We Are Drawn To, Why We Cannot Forget. Everything Is Collage, Even Genetics. There Is The Hidden Presence Of Others In Us, Even Those We Have Known Briefly. We Contain Them For The Rest Of Our Lives, At Every Border We Cross.

Forget Everything

All This Beethoven And Rain

If Any Of You On Your Journeys See Her-shout To Me, Whistle...he Sang, And It Became A Habit For Audiences To Shout And Whistle In Response To Those Lines. There Was Nowhere He Could Hide In Such A Song That Had All Of Its Doors And Windows Open, So That He Could Walk Out Of It Artlessly, The Antiphonal Responses Blending With Him As If He Were No Longer On Stage.

What Night Gave Rafael Was A Formlessness In Which Everything Had A Purpose. As If Darkness Had A Hidden Musical Language.

I See Myself As Someone Who's Been Saved By Writing. God Knows What I Would Have Been, Become Or How I Would Have Ended Up Without It.

Every Immigrant Family, It Seems, Has Someone Who Does Not Belong In The New Country They Have Come To. It Feels Like Permanent Exile To That One Brother Or Wife Who Cannot Stand A Silent Fate In Boston Or London Or Melbourne. I’ve Met Many Who Remain Haunted By The Persistent Ghost Of An Earlier Place.

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.

Meanwhile With The Help Of An Anecdote I Fell In Love. Words Caravaggio. They Have A Power.

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.

Nowadays He Doesn't Think Of His Wife, Though He Knows He Can Turn Around And Evoke Every Move Of Her, Describe Any Aspect Of Her, The Weigh Of Her Wrist On His Heart During The Night.

A Postcard. Neat Handwriting Fills The Rectangle. Half My Days I Cannot Bear To Touch You. The Rest Of My Time I Feel Like It Doesn’t Matter If I Will Ever See You Again. It Isn’t The Morality, It’s How Much You Can Bear. No Date. No Name Attached.

Read Him Slowly, Dear Girl, You Must Read Kipling Slowly. Watch Carefully Where The Commas Fall So You Can Discover The Natural Pauses. He Is A Writer Who Used Pen And Ink. He Looked Up From The Page A Lot, I Believe, Stared Through His Window And Listened To Birds, As Most Writers Who Are Alone Do. Some Do Not Know The Names Of Birds, Though He Did. Your Eye Is Too Quick And North American. Think About The Speed Of His Pen. What An Appalling, Barnacled Old First Paragraph It Is Otherwise.

Most Of The Time In Our World, Truth Is Just Opinion.

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.

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.

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.

The Rulers Of The Country Generally Believed That Betting Eliminates Strikes. Men Had To Work In Order To Gamble.

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.

Falling In Love

Before The Real City Could Be Seen It Had To Be Imagined, The Way Rumours And Tall Tales Were A Kind Of Charting.

…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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Melissa Etheridge

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