The English Patient

“I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking at the face of his wife.”

Here, the English patient compares his love of the desert landscape to his love of a woman; he also references loss of, and mourning for, both landscapes and people. His sense of losing track of identity and place within the desert invokes the theme of National Identity and Personal Identity.

“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.”

This quote emphasizes the importance of literature and Storytelling as a Form of Healing in the text. Hana treats books like methods of escape, from both the mundane quality of everyday life and the violence of war. Later, Katharine will treat literature in a very similar way.

“They were protected here by the simple fact that the villa seemed a ruin. But she felt safe here, half adult and half child.”

In this quote, both Hana and the villa are liminal in nature: The villa looks like a ruin from the outside, but is still habitable, and Hana looks like an adult but still has one foot in childhood.