The English Patient Quotes

“If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me,will you. Stop defending yourself.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“-I think you are inhuman. If I leave you, who will you go to? Would you find another lover?
I said nothing.
-Deny it,damn you!”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“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 imagines or remembers a meeting when the other had passed by innocently, just as Clifton might have opened a car door for you a year earlier and ignored the fate of his life. But all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.
I have lived in the desert for years and I have come to believe in such things. It is a place of pockets. The trompe l’oeil of time and water. The jackal with one eye that looks back and one that regards the path you consider taking. In his jaws are pieces of the past he delivers to you, and when all of that time is fully discovered it will prove to have been already known.”
― Ondaatje Michael.

“The Bedouin were keeping me alive for a reason. I was useful, you see. someone there had assumed I had a skill when my plane crashed in the desert. I am a man who can recognized an unnamed town by its skeletal shape on a map. I have always had information like a sea in me. I am a person who if left alone in someone´s home walks to the bookcase, pulls down a volume and inhales it. So history enters us. I knew maps of the sea floor, maps that depict weaknesses in the shield of the earth, charts painted on skin that contain the various routes of the Crusades”
― Michael Ondaatje

“She likes to lay her face against the upper reaches of his arm, that dark brown river, and to wake submerged within it, against the pulse of an unseen vein in his flesh beside her. The vein she would have to locate and insert a saline solution into if he were dying.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Sitôt que le soleil pénètre dans une pièce où pétille un feu, le feu disparaît.”
― Michael Ondaatje