The English Patient Quotes

“She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“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

“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.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“All I ever wanted was a world without maps.”
― 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 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

“He wants the minute and secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“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

“...the heart is an organ of fire.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“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

“From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he had loved her when he understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Her hand touched me at the wrist. "If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn't you?"

I didn't say anything.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“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

“I'll be looking at the moon,
but I'll be seeing you.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“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

“Don’t we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“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

“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

“You have to protect yourself from sadness. Sadness is very close to hate. Let me tell you this. This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone else's poison – thinking you can cure them by sharing it – you will instead store it within you. Those men in the desert were smarter than you. They assumed he could be useful. So they saved him, but when he was no longer useful they left him.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“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

“A postcard. Neat handwriting fills the rectangle.

Half my days I cannot bear to touch you.
The rest of my time I feel like it doesn’t matter if I will ever see you again. It isn’t the morality, it’s how much you can bear.

No date. No name attached.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“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

“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

“He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“A novel is a mirror walking down a road”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“What he would say, he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“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

“Could you fall in love with her if she wasn't smarter than you? I mean, she may not be smarter than you. But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? Think now.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names... Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient