“She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.”
Work
With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning
Quotes
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Michael Ondaatje
Canonical work source
“She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.”
“-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!”
“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.”
“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, fear...”
“Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.”
“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...”
“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...”
“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...”