The English Patient

me onto a cradle, a carcass boat, and feet thudded along as they ran with me. I had broken the spareness of the desert.
The Bedouin knew about fire. They knew about planes that since 1939 had been falling out of the sky. Some of their tools and utensils were made from the metal

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 preoccupation.

‘If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn’t you?’
I didn’t say anything.

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 preoccupation.

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 imagines or remembers a meeting when the other had passed by innocently, just as Clifton might have opened a car door for you a year earlier and ignored the fate of his life. But all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.

beans, but we need some chickens.’ She is looking at Caravaggio, knowing his skills from the past, not quite saying it.

A man she knew had come all the way by train and walked the four miles uphill from the village and along the hall to this table just to see her.

ssili I have seen rock engravings from

erself. She would not be ordered again or carry out duties for the

She was not concerned about t