Quotes
Listed here are favorite quotes from The English Patient. Quotes that inspire, or give a strong visual image, or just admiration of the author's words ..... poetic, lyrical, straightforward, cultural, etc ....
These notes were collected in celebration of Michael Ondaatje's birthday: September 12, 1943 “Ondaatje’s imagination acknowledges no borders” ~ Kamila Shamsie The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town. As a writer, one is busy with archaeology. In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind. Michael Ondaatje and Anthony Minghella interview on "The English Patient" (1996) "I promise, I'll come back for you. I promise, I'll never leave you." Michael Ondaatje Interview on Writers & Company - CBC Radio
I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, .... as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of preoccupation.
ReplyDeleteShe carried the six-foot crucifix from the bombed chapel and used it to build a scarecrow above her seedbed, hanging empty sardine cans from it which clattered and clanked whenever the wind lifted.
ReplyDeleteFor echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.
ReplyDeleteMoments 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.
ReplyDeleteYou 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.
ReplyDeleteShe finds rest as opposed to sleep the truly pleasurable state. 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.
ReplyDeleteCaravaggio would disturb you by simply enfolding you in his arms, his wings. With him you were embraced by character.
ReplyDeleteWhen he first saw her after all this time she had looked taut, boiled down to just body enough to get her through this efficiently. Her body had been in war and, as in love, it had used every part of itself.
ReplyDeleteA novel is a mirror walking down a road.
ReplyDelete"Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled of first paragraph it is otherwise."
ReplyDeleteIf he could walk across the room and touch her he would be sane. But between them lay a treacherous and complex journey. It was a very wide world.
ReplyDeleteThere are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lover enters the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.
ReplyDeleteA love story is not about those who love 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.
How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.
ReplyDeleteI was in her arms. I had pushed the sleeve of her shirt up to the shoulder so I could see her vaccination scar. I love this, I said. This pale aureole on her arm. I see the instrument scratch and then punch the serum within her and then release itself, free of her skin, years ago, when she was nine years old, in a school gymnasium.
Their bodies had met in perfumes, in sweat, frantic to get under that thin film with a tongue or tooth, as if they each could grip character there and during love pull it right off the body of the other.
ReplyDeleteHe sees her in differing hours and locations that alter her voice or nature, even her beauty, the way the background power of the sea cradles or governs the fate of lifeboats.
ReplyDeleteHer face slips into the light to kiss and lick and taste. His forehead toweling itself in the wetness of her hair.
ReplyDeleteThe wild poem is a substitute
ReplyDeleteFor the woman one loves or ought to love,
One wild rhapsody a fake for another.
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.
ReplyDeleteThe 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.
ReplyDeleteI carried Katherine Clifton into the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds
ReplyDeleteShe was singing it as if it was something scarred, as if one couldn't ever again bring all the hope of the song together .... Singing in the voice of a tired traveler, alone against everything. A new testament. There was no certainty to the song anymore, the singer could only be one voice against all the mountains of power.
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ReplyDeleteShe would see the khaki uniform flickering through the cypresses. The Englishman had called him fato profigus - fate's fugitive.
ReplyDelete"Love is so small it can tear itself through the eye of a needle."
ReplyDeleteShe 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.
ReplyDeleteShe was singing it as if it was something scared, as if one couldn't ever again bring all the hope of the song together .... Singing in the voice of a tired traveler, alone against everything. A new testament. There was no certainty to the song anymore, the singer could only be one voice against all the mountains of power.
ReplyDelete