Home > Work > The English Patient

The English Patient QUOTES

The English Patient QUOTES

1 " I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently…but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur. "

― Michael Ondaatje , The English Patient

2 " 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. "

― Michael Ondaatje , The English Patient

3 " I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you.
Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying near me in the last year. I didn’t feel scared. I
certainly wasn’t brave just now. I thought to myself, We have this villa this grass, we should have lain
down together, you in my arms, before we died. I wanted to touch that bone at your neck, collarbone,
it’s like a small hard wing under your skin. I wanted to place my fingers against it. I’ve always liked flesh
the colour of rivers and rocks or like the brown eye of a Susan, do you know what that flower is? Have
you seen them? I am so tired, Kip, I want to sleep. I want to sleep under this tree, put my eye against
your collarbone I just want to close my eyes without thinking of others, want to find the crook of a tree
and climb into it and sleep. What a careful mind! To know which wire to cut. How did you know? You
kept saying I don’t know I don’t know, but you did. Right? Don’t shake, you have to be a still bed for
me, let me curl up as if you were a good grandfather I could hug, I love the word ‘curl,’ such a slow
word, you can’t rush it... "

― Michael Ondaatje , The English Patient

4 " 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. "

― Michael Ondaatje , The English Patient

5 " Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert. "

― Michael Ondaatje , The English Patient

6 " 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. "

― Michael Ondaatje , The English Patient

7 " 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 Ondaatje , The English Patient

8 " Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations. "

― Michael Ondaatje , The English Patient

9 " She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams. "

― Michael Ondaatje , The English Patient

10 " 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. "

― Michael Ondaatje , The English Patient

11 " 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. "

― Michael Ondaatje , The English Patient

12 " 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... "

― Michael Ondaatje , The English Patient

13 " A love story is not about those who lost their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing—not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past. "

― Michael Ondaatje , The English Patient

14 " Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again "

― Michael Ondaatje , The English Patient

15 " She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. "

― Michael Ondaatje , The English Patient

16 " She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water. "

― Michael Ondaatje , The English Patient

17 " He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall. "

― Michael Ondaatje , The English Patient

18 " 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. "

― Michael Ondaatje , The English Patient

19 " Do you understand the sadness of geography? "

― Michael Ondaatje , The English Patient

20 " Around three a.m. he feels a presence in the room. He sees, for the pulse of a moment, a figure at the foot of his bed, against the wall or painted onto it perhaps, not quite discernible in the darkness of foliage beyond the candlelight. He mutters something, something he had wanted to say, but there is silence and the slight brown figure, which could be just a night shadow, does not move. A poplar. A man with plumes. A swimming figure. And he would not be so lucky, he thinks, to speak to the young sapper again.
He stays awake in any case this night, to see if the figure moves towards him. Ignoring the tablet that brings painlessness, he will remain awake till the light dies out and the smell of candle smoke drifts into his room and into the girl's room farther down the hall. If the figure turns around there will be paint on his back, where he slammed in grief against the mural of trees. When the candle dies out he will be able to see this.
His hand reaches out slowly and touches his book and returns to his dark chest. Nothing else moves in the room. [298] "

― Michael Ondaatje , The English Patient