A Quote by Michael Ondaatje

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.
Don't you think it's something strange that you rarely look at yourself in the mirror, except to do things like stand and ponder? I mean, in Shakespeare's day, it was thought that the mirror would reveal something, that it is trying to tell you something - not just to tidy your hair, but something more.
You shoot this and it always has something of yourself - sometimes it's more and sometimes it's less. I think after the shooting it depends on who your character is. You definitely learn something about yourself, or you get to know sides that you knew you had, but you had never activated or triggered in a way that allowed you to let them out. Bad and good, all of this is in all of us. But you definitely meet another side or a quarter or ten percent of yourself that you had an idea of, but never really knew about.
At the very end, without memory we are nothing. The things you say; the way you feel; the way you act in certain situations... it's because you have a memory of something. Imagine we are building the biggest, most solid room that we could ever have. And sometimes you need to work on it, because thoughts turn into memories. Sometimes they will start to create dreams and realities, and what actually happened changes inside yourself during the years. I think that's how to preserve reality; we change it so it stays alive. The thoughts may change, but the feeling remains.
It was unfair that people could pretend to be one thing when they were really something else. That they would get you on their side and then do nothing but fail, and fail, and fail again. People should come with warnings, like cigarette packs: involvement would kill you over time.
You should read something else." Why would he have done that to him?" I don't know," she said. Do you ever feel like Job?" She smiled, a little twinkle in her eyes. Sometimes." But you haven't lost your faith?" No," I knew she hadn't, but I think I was losing mine. Is it because you think you might get better?" No," she said,"its because its the only thing I have left.
Change is like to surfing. You can't just paddle into life, stand still and expect to stay on top of your board. The waves of change will knock you off and drag you under. Some people even think changes are fun! You are where you are because you want to be there. If you want to be somewhere else, you'll need to change.
I recognize thart even you, yourself, will change. Your ideals will change, your tastes will change, your desires will change. Your whole understandings of who you are had better change, because if it doesn't change, you've become a very static personality over a great many years, and nothing would displease me more. And so I recognize that the process of evolution will produce changes in you.
A FRIEND IS A PERSON . . . With whom you can be sincere. . . . To whom you never need to defend yourself. . . . On whom you can depend whether present or absent. . . . With whom you never need pretend. . . . To whom you can reveal yourself without fear of betrayal. . . . Who does not feel she owns you because you are her friend. . . . Who will not selfishly use you because she has your confidence. I WOULD HAVE SUCH A FRIEND. . . AND I WOULD BE SUCH A FRIEND. I DO HAVE SUCH A FRIEND!
I did not want to move. For I had the feeling that this was a place, once seen, that could not be seen again. If I left and then came back, it would not be the same; no matter how many times I might return to this particular spot the place and feeling would never be the same, something would be lost or something would be added, and there never would exist again, through all eternity, all the integrated factors that made it what it was in this magic moment.
For me, it's always more difficult and slightly exposing to play something that's close to yourself. I always like to try to hide, just because I can't stand the way I look. But, I think it's important to change every time and come up with something that's as interesting as it can be, for your characters.
Sometimes it still seems unreal just to board a plane and fly to America, because that's something that I'd always dreamed of, but I was completely sure would never happen, and sometimes, when I think about that, it still feels a bit unreal.
I like working in television because it's an evolving story that you tell. That's also one of the things I don't like about it, too. Because sometimes it's hard, and just when I think I've nailed something, it changes or we have to change it or change the joke or the character is evolving in a way that I don't have control over.
If you're worried about messaging, people will just move to something else. You know if you legislate against Facebook and Apple and Google and whatever else in the US, they'll just use something else. So are we really safer then? I would say no. I would say we're less safe, because now we've opened up all of the infrastructure for people to go wacko at.
Separate yourself from your ideas and your work and see them as something separate from yourself, you’ll feel you truly have the right to be wrong. If an idea fails, why not let it be the idea’s fault instead of your own? Allow your ideas to fail without turning them into personal defeat. When you fail you discover your boundaries. You map out the edges of your capabilities. And this allows you to eventually move beyond them. Being wrong eventually leads to being right. And even where it doesn’t, it’s still a more interesting path than being nothing.
All still when summer is over stand shocks in the field, nothing left to whisper, not even good-bye, to the wind. After summer was over we knew winter would come: we knew silence would wait, tall, patient calm.
If I knew something that would serve my country but would harm mankind, I would never reveal it; for I am a citizen of humanity first and by necessity, and a citizen of France second, and only by accident
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