Michael Ondaatje - Hands Quotes

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Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.

Michael Ondaatje
She lights a match in the dark hall and moves it onto the wick of the candle. Light lifts itself onto her shoulders. She is on her knees. She puts her hands on her thighs and breathes in the smell of the sulphur. She imagines she slap breathes in light.

Michael Ondaatje
In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover's name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence.

Michael Ondaatje
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.

Michael Ondaatje
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 hand and clutch it like a downer 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.

Michael Ondaatje
Kirpal's left hand swoops down and catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkle at the edge of his eyes behind his spectacles.

Michael Ondaatje
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)

Michael Ondaatje