For a long time now, I've been thinking about writing down these wonderful sentences. This is about it. Finally managed to do with the movie playing at the background. I imagine these sentences by themselves would tell you how much this book impressed me as a reader and a woman.
For the movie, I have many comments, every single one of them positive. No, not positive. Labeling a comment as positive would diminish the meaning of this movie to me. I'm simply left in awe everytime I watch it, everytime I listen to its soundtrack. (I prefer to drift to sleep with the music from English Patient for about a year or so. Imagine how much of an awe I should deeply be left in.) English Patient is about the most consuming love story, told in the best way possible: epic, dream-like and real.
That last scene when Almasy leaves the Cave of Swimmers holding Katherine in his arms, crying... It cannot be explained. Just. Witness that scene. You won't regret it. I promise.
Still, today it is water who is the stranger here. Water is the exile,
carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your
mouth. p.20
For echo is the soul of the voice excitin itself in hollow places. p.22
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. p.47
To rest was to receive
all aspects of the world without judgement. A bath in the sea, a fuck
with a soldier who never knew your name. Tenderness towards the unknown
and anonymous, which was a tenderness to the self. p.51
She would law belladonna over his eyes [...] P.54
There
are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with 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
sentecnes, although the heart is an organ of fire. A love story is not
about those who lose 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. p.104
There's a
painting by Caravaggio, done late in his life. David with the Head of
Goliath. In it, the young warrior holds at the end of his outstretched
arm the head of Goliath, ravaged and old. But that is not the true
sadness in the picture. It is assumed that the face of David is a
portrait of the youthful Caravaggio and the head of Goliath is a
portrait of him as an older man, how he looked when he did the painting.
Youth judging age at the en of its outstretched hand. The judging of
one's own mortality. p.123
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.
p.132
It is as though the surface were underlaid with
steam-pipes, with thousands of orifices through which tiny jets of steam
are puffing out. The sand leaps in little spurts and whirls. Inch by
inch the disturbance rises as the wind increases its force. It seems as
though the whole suface of the desert were rising in obedience to some
upthrusting force beneath. Larger pebbles strike against the shins, the
knees, the thighs. The sand-grains climb the body till it strikes the
face and goes over the head. The sky is shut out, all but the nearest
objects fade from view, the universe is filled. p.146
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
long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted
Europe and the East. 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. Fire and sand. We left the harbours of oasis. The places
water came to and touched …Ain, Bir, Wadi, Foggara, Khottara, Shaduf. I
didn't want my name against such beautiful names. Erase the family name!
Erase Nations! I was taught such things by the desert. p.148
I
don't think he loved the desert, but had an affection for it that grew
out of awe at out stark order, into which he wanted to fit himself -like
a joyous undergraduate who respects silent behaviour in a library.
p.152
Half my days I cannot bear not to touch you. The rest of
the time I feel it doesn't matter if I ever see you agin. It isn't the
morality, it is how much you can bear. p.164
Sometimes when she
is able to spend the night with him they are wakened by the three
minarets of the city beginning their prayers before dawn. He walks with
her through the indigo markets that lie between South Cairo and her
home. The beautiful songs of faith enter the air like arrows, one
minaret answering another, as if passing on a rumor of the two of them
as they walk through the cold morning air, the smell of charcoal and
hemp already making the air profound. Sinners in a holy city. p.164
There
is a plant he knows of near El Taj, whose heart, if one cuts it out, is
replaced with a fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can
drink the liquid the amount of a missing heart. The plant continues to
flourish for a year before it dies from some lack or other. p.165
They
are in the botanical garden, near the Cathedral of All Saints. She sees
one tear and leans forward and licks it, taking it into her mouth. As
she has taken the blood from his hand when he cut himself cooking for
her. Blood. Tear. He feels everything is missing from his body, feels he
contains smoke. All that is alive is the knowledge of future desire and
want. What he would say he cannot say to this woman whose open¬ness 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. p.167
What is
the name of that hollow at the base of a woman's neck? At the front.
What is it, does it have an official name? That hollow about the size of
an impress of your thumb? p.172
Don't we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it. p.182
Her husband was supposed to pick him up. The husband they had both loved until they began to love each other. p.184
Their
bodies had met in perfumes, in sweat, frantic to get under that thin
film with a tongue or a tooth, as if they each could grip character
there and during lobe pull it right off the body of the other. p.185
At
night, when she lets his hair free, he is once more an¬other
constellation, the arms of a thousand equators against his pillow, waves
of it between them in their embrace and in their turns of sleep. She
holds an Indian goddess in her arms, she holds wheat and ribbons. As he
bends over her it pours. She can tie it against her wrist. As he moves
she keeps her eyes open to witness the gnats of electricity in his hair
in the darkness of the tent. p.230
But if she asked him what
colour her eyes are, although he has come to adore her, he will not, she
thinks, be able to say. He will laugh and guess, but if she,
black-eyed, says with her eyes shut that they are green, he will believe
her. He may look intently at eyes but not register what colour they
are, the way food already in his throat or stomach is just texture more
than taste or specific object. p.231
When someone speaks he looks
at a mouth, not eyes and their colours, which, it seems to him, will
always alter de¬pending on the light of a room, the minute of the day.
Mouths reveal insecurity or smugness or any other point on the spectrum
of character. For him they are the most intricate aspect effaces. He’s
never sure what an eye reveals. But he can read how mouths darken into
callousness, suggest tenderness. One can often misjudge an eye from its
reaction to a simple beam of sunlight. p.231
She had grown older.
And he loved her more now than he loved her when he had understood her
better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was
what she herself had decided to become. p.234
In the desert to repeat something would be fling more water into the earth. Here nuance took you a hundred miles. p.245
This
Candaules had become passionately in love with his own wife; and having
become so, he deemed that his wife was fairer by far than all other
women. p.246
I'm a man who fasts until I see what I want. p. 249
I
sank to my knees in the mosaic-tiles hall, my face in the curtain of
her gown, the salt taste of these fingers in her mouth. We were a
strange statue, the two of us, before we began to unlock our hunger. Her
fingers scratching against the sand in my thinning hair. Cairo and all
deserts around us. p.251
The way a lover will always recognize the camouflage of other lovers. p. 252
She
had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave
her clarity, brought her reasons, shape. Whereas I though words bent
emotions like sticks in water. p.253
Death means you are in the third person. p. 263
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. p. 275
And all the names of
the tribes, the nomads of faith who walked in the monotone of the desert
and saw brightness and faith and colour. The way a stone or found metal
box or bone can become loved and turn eternal in a prayer. Such glory
of this country she enters now and becomes part of. 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 my 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. All I desired was to walk upon such as earth that had no
maps. p. 277
The Englishman once read me something, from a book: 'Love is so small it can tear itself through the eye of a needle.' p.306