The English Patient

• I think I was a pilot.

• How do you know you're not German if you don't remember anything?

• I must be a curse. Anybody who loves me, anybody who gets close to me. . . —or I must be cursed. Which is it?

• A very… plum… plum.

• Find that plant, cut out its hands.

• Marriage is not a fiction.

• There's a war. Where you come from becomes important.
  Why? I hate that idea.

• I apologize if I appear abrupt. I am rusty at social graces.

• You're in love with him, aren't you? Your poor patient. You think he's a saint because of the way he looks? I don't think he is.
  I'm not so in love with him. I'm in love with ghosts. And so is he. He's in love with ghosts.

• I'm one of his ghosts and he wouldn't even know.

• Ask him. Ask your saint who he is. Ask him who he's killed.

• Its probably none of my business— your wife… do you think it is appropriate to leave her?

• Why are you people so threatened by a woman?

• I have come to love that little tap of the fingernail against the syringe. Tap… Tap… Tap.

• Look. See? Move that— and no more Bach.

• I'll probably marry him.
  Really? That's sudden.
  My mother always told me I would summon my husband by playing the piano.

• In that case I suppose we can't charge.

• I've been thinking— how does someone like you decide to come to the desert?

• My God… they're swimming. Swimming.

• How do you explain… to someone who's never been here… feelings that seem quite wrong.

• We planned badly.

• I'm not one of the walking wounded. It's only one night. Besides… if I remain it's the most effective method of persuading my husband to abandon whatever he's doing and come and rescue us.

• There's really no need. This is just a scrapbook. They are too good. I should feel obliged. Thank you.

• And that would be unconscionable, I suppose, to feel any obligation? Yes. Of course it would.

• In a few minutes there'll be no stars— the air is filling with sand.

• This is not very good is it?

• "Yes" is a comfort. "Absolutely" is not.

• Let me tell you about winds.

• Could I ask you, please, to paste you paintings into my book? I should like to have them. I should be honored.

• Am I a terrible coward to ask how much water we have?

• There's also a plant - I've never seen it but I'm told you can cut a piece the size of a heart from this plant and the next day it will be filled with a delicious liquid.
  Find that plant. Cut out its heart.

• K at dawn — silhouetted.
  • Notes that Katherine finds in Almásy's book. They proceed into passages that read: "The neck of K can never [be something] not in my mind." and " K's clothes always at ease on her. Does he notice? What is the significance of Betrayal? Does K bother with a moral Labyrinth - K's debate - does she debate?

• Geoffrey's not in Cairo. He's not actually a buffoon. The plane wasn't a wedding present. It belongs to the British Government. They want aerial maps of the whole of North Africa. So I think he's in Ethiopia. In case you were counting on his sudden appearance.
  And the marriage. . . is that a fiction?
  No, the marriage isn't a fiction.

• Am I "K" in your book? I think I must be.

• It's still there, the cannon, outside the museum. It was made of metal cups and bowls taken from every household in the city as tax, then melted down. Then later they fired the cannon at my people - "comma" - The natives - "full stop".

• What I really object to, Uncle, is your finishing all my condensed milk —and the message everywhere in your book - however slowly I read it - that the best destiny for India is to be ruled by the British.

• Condensed milk - one of the truly great inventions.

• Hana was just telling me that you were indifferent. . . to her cooking.

• Mrs. Clifton. . . I believe you still have my book.

• You still have sand in your hair.

• "It wouldn't be make believe if you believed in me."
  • Almásy singing the tune "It's Only a Paper Moon" (by Harold Arlen, Billy Rose, and E. Y. Harburg)

• A woman should never learn to sew, and if she can she shouldn't admit to it.

• Almásy: When were you most happy?
  Katharine: Now.
  Almásy: When were you least happy?
  Katharine: Now.

• Almásy: What do you love? Say everything.
  Katharine: Water— fish in it— and hedgehogs— I love hedgehogs. Marmite— I'm addicted, and baths, but not with other people! Islands— and your handwriting. I could go on all day.
  Almásy: Go on all day.
  Katharine: My husband.
  Almásy: And what do you hate most?
  Katharine: A lie. And what do you hate most?
  Almásy: Ownership— or being owned. When you leave, you should forget me.

• "Dec. 22nd [1938] — Betrayals during war are childlike compared with our betrayals during peace. New lovers are nervous and tender, but smash everything. For the heart is an organ of fire."
  "For the heart is an organ of fire"— I love that. I believe that.
  • Hana reading Almásy's note on the Christmas firecracker.

• K is for Katherine.

• I can still taste you. I try to write with your taste in my mouth.

• I long for the rain on my face.

• I'm going to suprise her. It's our anniversary. She's forgotten, of course.

• Szerelam means love. And the story, well, there's this Hungarian count. He's a wanderer. He's a fool. And for years he's on some kind of a quest for... who knows what. And then one day, he falls under the spell of a mysterious English woman. A harpy, who beats him, and hits him, he he becomes her slave, and he sews her clothes, and worships— Stop it! Stop it! You're always beating me!
  Bastard! You bastard, I believed you! You should be my slave.

• Madox knows I think— he keeps talking about Anna Karenina— I think it's his idea of a man to man chat… well it's my idea of a man to man chat.

• This a different world is what I tell myself, a different life, and here I'm a different wife.

• I don't care to bargain.

• Shall we be all right?
  Yes. Yes. —Absolutely.
  Oh dear.

• I can't do this anymore.

• I'm not agreeing. Don't think I'm agreeing, because I'm not.

• I just wanted you to know— I'm not missing you yet.
  You will. . . You will.

• The International Sand Club: misfits, buggers, fascists, and fools— God bless us every one. Ooops! mustn't say "international"— dirty word, filthy word.

• Do you think you are the only one who feels anything? Is that what you think?

• Then I tell myself he spends all day searching, in the night he wants to be found.
  I do. I do want you to find me. I do want to be found.

• This is what I do. I do this every day.

• It's raining.

• So. I come across the hospital convoy, I'm looking for this stuff. This nurse, Mary, tells me about you and Hana, hiding in some monastery, in what you call it — retreat - how you'd come in from the desert and you were burned and you didn't remember your name, but you knew the words to every song that ever was and you had one possession - a copy of Herodutus and it was filled with letters and cuttings, and then I know it was you. . . I'd seen you writing in that book. At the embassy in Cairo, when I had thumbs, and you had a face. And a name.

• There was a result to what you did.

• Thousands of people did die. Just different people.

• No! I was never a spy.

• It's ghastly. It's a witchhunt. Anyone remotely foreign is suddenly a spy.

• We didn't care about countries did we? Brits, Arabs, Hungarians, Germans. None of that mattered, did it? It was something finer than that.

• I have to teach myself not to read too much into everything. It comes from too long having to read so much into hardly anything at all.

• In case you're still wondering, This is called a supersternal notch.

• Katherine? My God, Katherine what are you doing here?

• Why did you hate me? Don't you know you drove everybody mad?

• You speak so many bloody languages, and you never want to talk.

• You're wearing the thimble.
  Of course. You idiot. I always wear it. I've always worn it. I've always loved you.

• Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again.

• May I see your papers sir?

• I'm sorry, I'm not making sense— forgive me— I, I'm— I've been walking, and I've - there's a woman badly injured at the Gilf Kebir, —the Cave of Swimmers. I'm a member of the Royal Geographical Society.

• I have been walking for three days, I do not want to spell my name.

• You get to the morning and the poison leaks away, doesn't it? Black nights. I thought I would kill you.
  You can't kill me. I died years ago.
  No, I can't kill you now.

• Thank You.

• Read to me will you? Read me to sleep.

• My darling, I'm waiting for you— how long is a day in the dark, or a week? The fire is gone now, and I'm horribly cold. I really ought to drag myself outside but then there would be the sun. . . I'm afraid I waste the light on the paintings and on writing these words...

• We die, we die rich with lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed... bodies we have entered and swum up like rivers, fears we have hidden in, like this wretched cave...

• We are the real countries, not the boundaries drawn on maps with the names of powerful men. I know you will come and carry me out into the palace of winds. That's all I've wanted— to walk in such a place with you, with friends, on earth without maps.

Cast

• Ralph Fiennes - Count Laszlo de Almásy
• Juliette Binoche - Hana
• Willem Dafoe - David Caravaggio
• Kristin Scott Thomas - Katharine Clifton
• Naveen Andrews - Lt. Kip Singh
• Colin Firth - Geoffrey Clifton
• Julian Wadham - Madox

External links