A Quote by Michael Ondaatje
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.
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Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.
It's not easy to start over in a new place,' he said. 'Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.
Brazil is where I belong, the place that feels like home. They love their family, their country and God, and are not afraid to let anybody know it.
My family comes from New Zealand, but I'm a London girl. I was born and raised in London, but I've got the blood of a New Zealander, so I always kind of felt like I didn't belong - in a good way.
Brick Lane' is actually a place in London where many Bangladeshis live. It is about one such Bangladeshi immigrant family.
For it is the fate of a woman Long to be patient and silent, to wait like a ghost that is speechless, Till some questioning voice dissolves the spell of its silence. Hence is the inner life of so many suffering women Sunless and silent and deep, like subterranean rivers Runnng through caverns of darkness.
I've been in the presence of a ghost, but I've never actually seen a ghost. I don't know if I actually believe in ghosts, to be honest with you. I don't think they exist, but I think they have more to do with energy. People say if someone died in a place it would be haunted, well people have died everywhere, so the whole entire world is haunted.
For any kid who feels like a newcomer, who feels like they don't belong, my candidacy says, 'Not only do you belong, you can also aspire to run this country.'
Suddenly the land is haunted by all these dead Indians. There is this new fascination with the Southwest, with places like Santa Fe, New Mexico, where people come down from New York and Boston and dress up as Indians. When I go to Santa Fe, I find real Indians living there, but they are not involved in the earth worship that the American environmentalists are so taken by. Many of these Indians are interested, rather, in becoming Evangelical Christians.
In London I have been by turns poor and rich, hopeful and despondent, successful and down and out, utterly miserable and ecstatically, dizzily happy. I belong to London as each of us can belong to only one place on this earth. And, in the same way, London belongs to me.
This character feels so much like my brother. He has two children. He has a wife. He works with me. He chooses to stay in New Hampshire because he wants his kids to grow up in the school they started with. He doesn't want them to lose friends. He is his family's hero.
It seems to me that the novel is very much alive as a form. Without any question, every epoch has its own forms, and the novel nowadays cannot resemble that of the nineteenth century. In this domain all experiments are justified, and it is better to write something new clumsily than to repeat the old brilliantly. In the nineteenth century, novels dealt with the fate of a person or of a family; this was linked to life in that period. In our time the destinies of people are interwoven. Whether man recognizes it or not, his fate is much more linked to that of many other people than it used to be.
As a new artist, you come out, and there are so many other new artists. It seems like there's a whole wave of new artists that come along every year. In '05, I was part of the crop. It was a lot harder trying to set myself apart from the rest of the pack.
The whole country needs to get to the bottom of what really happened with the Russian collusion allegations. But in the meantime, we have a president Donald Trump who himself says trust me. He does not accept the boundaries of law. He basically says that if anybody gets too close for comfort, I'm going to get rid of them. And as long as that's in place, we cannot afford as a country to put our fate in the hands of someone so whimsical and so unpredictable.
In other places, especially in Boston, it's like a place where comedy gestates. People come out of there that are fantastic, but you have to come to New York or L.A. to quote unquote 'make it.'
I was born in Boston. I spent time in Boston and in Spain. My family now lives in Spain. I moved to New York when I was 19 years old and I have lived here ever since. For me, I feel like I have spent 10 years sharing that story over and over again. And now it seems like it's not enough.
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