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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 -
Patriotism is not enough—I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone.
Elizabeth Wein
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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 -
If you show this devious little liar one atom's worth of compassion I will have you shot.
Elizabeth Wein -
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 -
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 -
I had been in France less than 48 hours before that obliging agent of yours had to stop me being run over by a French van full of French chickens because I’d looked the wrong way before crossing the street. Which shows how cunning the Gestapo are. “This person I’ve pulled from beneath the wheels of certain death was expecting traffic to travel on the left side of the road. Therefore she must be British, and is likely to have parachuted into Nazi-occupied France out of an Allied plane. I shall now arrest her as a spy.
Elizabeth Wein -
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
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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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
You can't just sit in a corner weeping or you'll die.
Elizabeth Wein -
It never occurred to him that now he was looking at his master, at the one person in all the world who held his fate right between her palms - me, in patched hand-me-downs and untrimmed hair and idiot smile - and that my hatred for him is pure and black and unforgiving. And that I don't believe in God, but if I did, if I did, it would be the God of Moses, angry and demanding and OUT FOR REVENGE.
Elizabeth Wein
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How did you ever get here, Maddie Brodatt?" "'Second to the right, and then straight on till morning,'" she answered promptly-it did feel like Neverland. "Crikey, am I so obviously Peter Pan?" Maddie laughed. "The Lost Boys give it away." Jamie studied his hands. "Mother keeps the windows open in all our bedrooms while we're gone, like Mrs. Darling, just in case we come flying home when she's not expecting us.
Elizabeth Wein -
I am scared of the way they are clinging to the French and Belgian ports, even though they’ve been pushed out of most of the rest of France. There is something about it that spooks me. They’ve lost.
Elizabeth Wein -
God knows what I thought! Your brain does amazing acrobatics when it doesn't want to believe something.
Elizabeth Wein -
I tend not to attempt to describe pain. I don't feel I can comprehend or re-create the personal suffering of others, so I simply try to tell what happened, or what I imagine happened. I also think it helps to let the reader fill in a lot of the blanks. Melodrama is patronizing. With a straightforward statement, readers can figure out for themselves what's going on.
Elizabeth Wein -
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 -
KISS ME, HARDY! Kiss me, QUICK!
Elizabeth Wein
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That's why we like to make things pretty; it's just'cause we're so dang sick of cleaning up horrible messes.
Elizabeth Wein -
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 -
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 -
Equality comes in different forms, and it is a lot harder being a girl in Ethiopia than it was in Pennsylvania.
Elizabeth Wein