How we cite our quotes: All quotations are from The English Patient.
Quote #7
ALMÁSY: Thousands of people did die. Just different people.
This sounds cold, but it is an interesting point. Almásy couldn't have stopped the course of the war, and he didn't make it worse. He only changed it. But he changed it in a way that added many casualties to the Allied side.
Quote #8
MADOX: It's ghastly. It's like a witch hunt. Anybody 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.
Madox reiterates the point of how people worked together, in peace, before the war. War tears not just nations apart, but smaller communities too, like the community of international mapmakers in the desert.