Gertrude Bell: Nightingale with drops in heart bleed. A fed red rose. Then came the wind. And catching her, jealous branches. I have coiled heart with a hundred thorns
Gertrude Bell: Eternal love that keeps arms satisfied. Earth, air, deep. Light nights and harvest my heart. You are mine at last in everlasting remembrance. Oh, how easy it was to leave! He left height of the pilgrimage. Oh, I can not begin the journey, for God help me lift the weights. And Mila be my traveling companion. Girl's my impression of dust, nights I'm wet. The dust and tears, turquoise vault. I must bricks for the house joys. Yet I never harbored, and the time was gone. What am I playing? Checkered floor on the night and day. Death won the game.
Gertrude Bell: Paradise has no time, age or sanctuary. Awaits us.
Charles Doughty-Wylie: It's the most unbearable thing of liability
Winston Churchill: My cigar was finished. That's the end of the world.
[first lines]

Sir Mark Sykes: [stadning at a map] Assuming become Ottoman Empire finally becomes defunct, Russia would get the Dardanelles, the portion closest to them, and the Italians the islands off the mainland.

Winston Churchill: And the French had no problem with that?

Charles Doughty-Wylie: The French have a problem with anything. That's their nature.
Florance Bell: You will not scare the young men with intelligence.

Gertrude Bell: How do I do that? I can't play dumb.

Florance Bell: Just listen to what they have to say, and smile.

Gertrude Bell: That will be hard.

Florance Bell: Gertrude...
Hugh Bell: You were only 5 years, and you were already reading voraciously. And someone stupidly showed you Leonardo da Vinci's sketchbook.

Gertrude Bell: I remember the one with the parachute!

Florance Bell: Who ever would need a parachute?

Gertrude Bell: Everyone. Everyone needs a parachute.
Frank Lascelles: Florence, stop that moody brooding.

Florence Lascelles: [sobbing] Oh, father...

Florance Bell: Frank...

Frank Lascelles: Please don't Frank, Frank me.

Florance Bell: She is a girl

Frank Lascelles: My dinner table is a no-cry zone.

Florance Bell: I'm sorry I gave birth to a daughter. You wanted a boy, obviously.

Frank Lascelles: Absolutely not. You could have born me a dromedary and I wouldn't have minded. Look, darling. There is a good side about tears. If you cry a lot, you need to pee much less.

Florence Lascelles: [runs away sobbing]
Henry Cadogan: It was important that I solved the particular mystery.

Gertrude Bell: What mystery?

Henry Cadogan: Well you see, I love your smile. But many a man in love with a woman's smile, has made the mistake of marrying the whole girl.

Gertrude Bell: [laying back] Here's the whole girl.
Gertrude Bell: Even if you do not hear from me for several months, pay no attention and send no one.

Charles Doughty-Wylie: The Druzes will take you for a spy.

Gertrude Bell: Yes, well maybe I am. Maybe I am a spy. But I am a spy for no one. No one but myself.
Gertrude Bell: I operate for no one.

Sir Mark Sykes: What is it then that attracts you to the Bedouin out there?

Gertrude Bell: Something that you and your world you can not ever understand. It's their freedom. It's their dignity. It's their poetry of life.
Charles Doughty-Wylie: Will you write to me?

Gertrude Bell: Yes, I'll write to you from every post office in the desert.
Gertrude Bell: [writing in her diary] Already I have dropped back into the desert as if it were my own place. Silence and solitude all around me like an impenetrable veil. Sleep more profound that civilization contrives. And then, the roadless desert, again.
Charles Doughty-Wylie: Love is a tyrant, sparing none.
Gertrude Bell: England needs to get out of its colonies sooner rather than later.

Col. T.E. Lawrence: I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.
[last lines]

King Faisal (King Faycal): [as Gertrude rides into the desert on her camel] How could she know that we will be kings?

King Abdullah: She is the maker of kings. She is the crowned queen of the desert.

Title Card: Faisal and Abdullah soon became kings in Iraq and Jordan. Gertrude Bell delineated the borders of their kingdoms. Based on her recommendations, the British helped Ibn Saud claim Arabia as his kingdom. Gertrude Bell never married. She died in Baghdad in 1926, where she is buried. The Bedouin tribes still remember her fondly as the single foreigner who understood them best.

Queen of the Desert Quotes

Extended Reading

Queen of the Desert short comments

Heloise 2022-04-19 09:03:19

A lot of men fall in love because of a woman's smile A lot of women fall in love because of a man's promise
Demarco 2022-04-19 09:03:19

This is too small to say, and it still focuses on the relationship between the heroine and a few men, and does not feel the atmosphere of her as a very politically influential woman.