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.
Michael OndaatjeRead
You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the value of expressing oneself through the interpretations and perspectives of others.
Michael Ondaatje suggests that true expression often comes not just from a solitary voice, but rather through the lens of others' experiences and insights. When we allow ourselves to connect with and convey our thoughts through the narratives and voices of others, we can enrich our own identity and creativity, leading to a deeper understanding and resonance.
Themes
ExpressionIdentityCreativityPerspectiveVoice
In practice
Example use cases
During a writing workshop, a participant could use this quote to discuss the importance of collaboration in creative writing.
More from Michael Ondaatje
All quotes βWhen 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.
Michael OndaatjeRead
Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.
Michael OndaatjeRead
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.
Michael OndaatjeRead
A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.
Michael OndaatjeRead
I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.
Michael OndaatjeRead
Similar quotes
I joyfully hasten to meet death. If it come before I have had opportunity to develop all my artistic faculties, it will come, my hard fate notwithstanding, too soon, and I should probably wish it later - yet even then I shall be happy, for will it not deliver me from a state of endless suffering?
Ludwig Van BeethovenRead
It wasn't a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing - and loving. Language became an addiction.
Yusef KomunyakaaRead
I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
V. S. NaipaulRead
One must act in painting as in life, directly.
Pablo PicassoRead
Color is a plastic means of creating intervals... color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony.
Hans HofmannRead
Joy is the zest that you get out of using your talents, your understanding, the totality of your being, for great aims...That's the kind of feeling that goes with creativity. That's why I say the courage to create. Creation does not come out of simply what you're born with. That must be united with your courage, both of which cause anxiety, but also great joy.
Rollo MayRead