Top 100 Elizabeth Wein Quotes
#2. A whore, we've established that, filthy, it goes without saying, but whatever else the hell I am, I AM NOT ENGLISH.
Elizabeth Wein
#3. He wept when they told him you were no longer allowed to see him. He WEPT. How much weeping have you done on his account, girl?"
"I wake up screaming every night on his account.
Elizabeth Wein
#4. Incredible. It is just incredible that you can notice something like that when your face is so cold you can't feel it anymore, and you know perfectly well you are surrounded by death, and the only way to stay alive is to endure the howling wind and hold your course. And still the sky is beautiful.
Elizabeth Wein
#5. Godless as I am, I pray she's got away with it. It's like ripples in a pond, isn't it? It doesn't stop in one place.
Elizabeth Wein
#6. The fuss made over the chickens at the checkpoints is not to be believed. Unlike me they had their own papers.
Elizabeth Wein
#7. You can't just sit in a corner weeping or you'll die.
Elizabeth Wein
#8. Don't know how I kept going. You just do. You have to, so you do.
Elizabeth Wein
#10. But while they stayed down, rolling around and trying to kill each other, Em jumped to her feet.
Her costumes sometimes have little finishing touches that no one can see. She hadn't told me about this one.
Elizabeth Wein
#11. Where I fail in accuracy, I hope I make up for it in plausibility.
Elizabeth Wein
#12. I am like a ruined piece of parchment scrawled over and over again with your name, so many times it has become illegible.
Elizabeth Wein
#13. In trust and wisdom you can be as far superior to anyone as you dare make yourself.
Elizabeth Wein
#15. I have nothing to lose. I am going to dare it. I will aim for the sun.
Elizabeth Wein
#16. These trials aren't about revenge. They're about justice. Don't you want justice, Rose Justice?
Elizabeth Wein
#17. But people need lift, too. People don't get moving, they don't soar, they don't achieve great heights, without someone buoying them up.
Elizabeth Wein
#19. Equality comes in different forms, and it is a lot harder being a girl in Ethiopia than it was in Pennsylvania.
Elizabeth Wein
#20. Incredible what slender threads you begin to hang your hopes on.
Elizabeth Wein
#21. Hope is treacherous, but how can you live without it?
Elizabeth Wein
#22. There is only one reason I did not go down in flames over the Angers, and that is because I knew I had Julie in the back. Would never have had the presence of mind to put that fire out if I hadn't been trying to save her life.
Elizabeth Wein
#23. Nothing like an arcane literary debate with your tyrannical master while you pass the time leading to your execution.
Elizabeth Wein
#25. A poet and a doctor. Maybe I could.
This the first thought I have of it. Maybe I could.
Elizabeth Wein
#26. Unless you were doing them a favor by killing them. Then, you'd let them down if you didn't, if you couldn't make yourself.
Elizabeth Wein
#27. The anticipation of what they will do to you is every bit as sickening in a dream as when it is really going to happen.
Elizabeth Wein
#28. Oh Julie, wouldn't I know if you were dead? Wouldn't I feel it happening, like a jolt of electricity to my heart?
Elizabeth Wein
#29. A part of me will always be unflyable, stuck in the climb.
Elizabeth Wein
#30. Southampton's barrage balloons floated gleaming in the moonlight like the ghosts of elephants and hippos.
Elizabeth Wein
#31. It's like being in love, discovering your best friend.
Elizabeth Wein
#32. There is no end," I said. "Only the beginning of something else.
Elizabeth Wein
#33. Sometimes I feel as if the only thing I can do is write. It helps me think.
Elizabeth Wein
#34. Kiss me, Hardy!' Weren't those Nelson's last words at the Battle of Trafalgar? Don't cry. We're still alive and we make a sensational team.
Elizabeth Wein
#36. Here he comes, moving among the enemies all on his own. Do you see? He acts alone, but he is not alone. He has an army behind him, also, my army; and with our lives we will fight to defend him.
Elizabeth Wein
#37. Don't you ever do that to me."
"You know you'll never make as much of a fool of yourself as Horatio Augustus. So I won't have to.
Elizabeth Wein
#39. She whispered, 'C'etait la Verite?' Was that Verity? Or perhaps she just meant, Was that the truth? Was it true? Did any of it really happen? Were the last three hours real? 'Yes,' I whispered back. 'Oui. C'etait la verite.
Elizabeth Wein
#41. Teach your boy to fly, and he will be safe from spears and antique rifles." "I don't want him to go to war at all!" "When it comes, you will have no choice. The only way to save him is to lift him above the crowd.
Elizabeth Wein
#42. Queenie, herself again, took hold of Maddie's hand and squeezed it tightly. She walked all the way back across the airfield without letting it go. Maddie closed her eyes and flew again in the ethereal pale green light. She knew she would never let it go.
Elizabeth Wein
#43. There's glory and honour in being chosen. But not much room for free will
Elizabeth Wein
#44. Maddie took the top of her egg off. The hot bright yolk was like summer sun breaking through cloud. The first daffodil in the snow. A gold sovereign wrapped in a white silk handkerchief. She dipped her spoon in it and licked it.
Elizabeth Wein
#45. Von Loewe really should know me well enough by now to realize that I am not going to face my execution without a fight. Or with anything remotely resembling dignity.
Elizabeth Wein
#46. That would be a slow and cruel death," said Gebe Meskal quietly. "He may survive a week on such a regime, but so little of a skin is not sufficient water for a man laboring in the desert."
Telemakos said through his teeth, "It is for a child.
Elizabeth Wein
#47. It's an illusion I've noticed before
words on a page are like oxygen to a petrol engine, firing up ghosts. It only lasts while the words are in your head. After you put down the paper or pen, the pistons fall lifeless again.
Elizabeth Wein
#48. If I am very lucky - I mean if I am clever about it - I will get myself shot. Here, soon.
Elizabeth Wein
#49. I wish you could go through life without ever caring about anything, without ever getting attached to people and dreams and inaccessible places. It just makes you sad when you can never go back.
Elizabeth Wein
#51. Maddie quickly pulled down the blackout curtains over her bright and vulnerable soul.
Elizabeth Wein
#52. He just put his hand through the bulkhead, exactly as she'd done, and squeezed my shoulder. He has very strong fingers.
And he kept his hand there the whole way home, even when he was reading the map and giving me headings.
So I am not flying alone now after all.
Elizabeth Wein
#55. But I've never despised myself so much as I did that day - she was so small and - so fierce, so beautiful, it was like breaking a hawk's wings, stopping up a clear spring with bricks - digging up roses to make space to park your tank. Pointless and ugly.
Elizabeth Wein
#56. She tried not to think about what it would be like running across the airfield to the radio room an hour from now, under fire. But she did it. Because you do. It is incredible what you do, knowing you have to.
Elizabeth Wein
#58. Follow them," said Goewin, "and listen."
So he did.
Elizabeth Wein
#60. Black Dove, let's write. Let's work on a story. Let's work on Glassland."
"Make me a prisoner in the Fortress of Clarity."
"Got to rescue you.
Elizabeth Wein
#61. She was never so petty. She did not dabble with minnows at the surface when there were thirty-pound salmon swimming deeper down.
Elizabeth Wein
#62. It was wonderful flirting with him, all the razor-edged literary banter, like Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. A battle of wit, and a test, too.
Elizabeth Wein
#63. You know how sometimes when you come home and you haven't seen a place for so long that it seems unbelievably beautiful, and you want to cry because you love it so much you think it's going to break your heart? I felt like that, too. I am HOME.
Elizabeth Wein
#64. But I have told the truth. Isn't that ironic? They sent me because I am so good at telling lies. But I have told the truth.
Elizabeth Wein
#65. I loved that phrase: soul mate. We asked Grandma what it meant and she said, 'Two people who understand each other without talking about it. Two halves of a whole.
Elizabeth Wein
#66. But more often than not the missing face has been sucked into the engines of the Nazi death machine, like an unlucky lapwing hitting the propeller of a Lancaster bomber-nothing left but feathers blowing away in the aircraft's wake, as if those warm wings and beating heart had never existed.
Elizabeth Wein
#67. Doing the thing you are scared of is much harder than not being afraid of anything. It is easy to be brave. It is not so easy to be scared and do a brave thing anyway.
Elizabeth Wein
#68. It had never occurred to me that simply being with a fellow prisoner would make me feel like I was still in prison.
Elizabeth Wein
#69. Things became more civilized all of a sudden. Coffee does that. Or maybe it is women who do that.
Elizabeth Wein
#70. Everything I know about passive resistance I learned from Micheline. She always appeared to be doing exactly as she was told, but everything she did took twice as long as it should have.
Elizabeth Wein
#71. Five years of destruction and mayhem, lives lost everywhere, shortages of food and fuel and clothing - and the insane mind behind it just urges us all on and on to more destruction. And we all keep playing.
Elizabeth Wein
#72. I don't recognise any of my emotions any more. There's no such thing as plain joy or grief. It's horror and relief and panic and gratitude all jumbled together.
Elizabeth Wein
#73. But she did it. Because you do. It is incredible what you do, knowing you have to. A
Elizabeth Wein
#74. I mean, we are all in it together. None of us is innocent; none of us is alone."
"You were both.
Elizabeth Wein
#75. Emmy and I are still Habte Sadek's favorite foreigners, and it is all because I wanted to look at his feet when I was eleven years old! But it never hurts to be polite to people.
Elizabeth Wein
#76. I am in the Special Operations Executive because I can speak French and German and am good at making up stories, and I am a prisoner in the Ormaie Gestapo HQ because I have no sense of direction whatsoever.
Elizabeth Wein
#77. Bloody Machiavellian English Intelligence Officer playing God
Elizabeth Wein
#78. Stars poked through like holes in the cloth of the sky and shed no light on anything.
Elizabeth Wein
#79. God knows what I thought! Your brain does amazing acrobatics when it doesn't want to believe something.
Elizabeth Wein
#81. How can you grow to love a handful of strangers so fiercely just because you have to sleep on the same couple of wooden planks with them, when half the time you were there you wanted to strangle them, and all you ever talked about is death and imaginary strawberries?
Elizabeth Wein
#82. If you show this devious little liar one atom's worth of compassion I will have you shot.
Elizabeth Wein
#83. She gave me a dirty look. Then she broke into the bubbly champagne laugh. She turned and ran, limping but steady. She laughed over he shoulder, letting out the line as I held the kite above my head.
"Run with me, Rose," she cried.
Elizabeth Wein
#84. I am no longer afraid of getting old. Indeed I can't believe I ever said anything so stupid. So childish. So offensive and arrogant.
But mainly, so very, very stupid. I desperately want to grow old.
Elizabeth Wein
#85. One moment flying in green sunlight, then the sky suddenly grey and dark.
Elizabeth Wein
#87. It was a rather extraordinary conversation if you think about it
both of us speaking in code. But not military code, not Intelligence or Resistance code
just feminine code.
Elizabeth Wein
#88. Fight with realistic
hope, not to destroy
all the world's wrong,
but to renew its good.
Elizabeth Wein
#89. I don't believe for a minute-that we wouldn't have become friends somehow-that an unexploded bomb wouldn't have gone off and blown us both into the same crater, or that God himself wouldn't have come along and knocked our heads together in a flash of green sunlight. But it wouldn't have been likely.
Elizabeth Wein
#91. But a part of me lies buried in lace and roses on a riverbank in France-a part of me is broken off forever. A part of me will be unflyable, stuck in the climb.
Elizabeth Wein
#92. And you know, it was like I was breathing my own self back into me to say these word,s to remember that these things existed
the green trees of the eastern woodland at home in North America, their strong and supple branches, sunlight through the trees.
Elizabeth Wein
#93. Must stop. This ink is amazing, it really doesn't smear, even when you cry on it
Elizabeth Wein
#94. Maddie held her lightly, thinking she would let go when her friend stopped crying. But she cried for so long that Maddie fell asleep first. So she didn't ever let go.
Elizabeth Wein
#95. (I really would like to catapult myself back there in time and kick my own teeth in.)
Elizabeth Wein
#96. So, I have no sense of direction. In some of us it is a TRAGIC FLAW, and
Elizabeth Wein
#97. I, of course, took the opportunity to interpose with pigheaded Wallace pride, 'I am not English, you ignorant Jerry bastard, I am a SCOT.
Elizabeth Wein
#98. There were no route maps posted on the walls, but a Wonderland-style sign commanding, 'If you know where you are, then please tell others.
Elizabeth Wein
#99. More than anything else, I think, Maddie went to war on behalf of the Holy Island seals.
Elizabeth Wein
#100. She has the filthiest tongue of any woman in France. Burn her mouth clean.
Elizabeth Wein
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