Elizabeth Wein Quotes
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People are complicated. There is so much more to everybody than you realize. You see someone in school everyday, or at work, in the canteen, and you share a cigarette of a coffee with them, and you talk about the weather or last night's air raid. But you don't talk so much about what was the nastiest thing you ever said to your mother, or how you pretended to be David Balfour, the hero of Kidnapped, for the whole of the year when you were 13, or what you imagine yourself doing with the pilot who looks like Leslie Howard if you were alone in his bunk after a dance.
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It’s not desperation—there is something inhuman in it. That is what I find so creepy. 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.
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Writing to you like this makes me feel that you are still alive. It’s an illusion I’ve noticed before—words on a page are like oxygen to a petrol engine, firing up ghosts. It lasts only while the words are in your head. After you put down the paper or the pen, the pistons fall lifeless again.
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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.
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Nothing like an arcane literary debate with your tyrannical master while you pass the time leading to your execution.
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Her own hair was a glory of copper fire that morning, shining like a whisky still, long and loose in gentle flames down her back.
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Sometimes I feel as if the only thing I can do is write. It helps me think.
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Hope is treacherous, but how can you live without it?
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It had never occurred to me that simply being with a fellow prisoner would make me feel like I was still in prison.
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Bloody Machiavellian English Intelligence Officer playing God.
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People are complicated. There is so much more to everybody than you realise.
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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.
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Look at me!’ I screeched. ‘Look at me, Amadeus von Linden, you sadistic hypocrite, and watch this time! You’re not questioning me now, this isn’t your work, I’m not an enemy agent spewing wireless code! I’m just a minging Scots slag screaming insults at your daughter! So enjoy yourself and watch! Think of Isolde! Think of Isolde and watch!
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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.
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Inspector Milne's suspicious prying appeared to have awakened her inner Bolshevik, and so I discovered my own lady mother is not above quietly circumventing the law.
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I have nothing to lose. I am going to dare it. I will aim for the sun.
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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.
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One moment flying in green sunlight, then the sky suddenly grey and dark.
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I really would like to catapult myself back there in time and kick my own teeth in.
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Don’t you think it makes them stronger when you give them someone to despise?
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Listening to the Rabbits talk about their operations was like watching a horror movie in a foreign language. You sort of hoped you’d misunderstood what was going on. And then when you figured out what was really going on, it was worse than you’d thought.
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How do you ever hold on to anybody?
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I think as readers we put ourselves in the protagonist's place because we want to be like that person. That's why sometimes we don't like protagonists who aren't all that nice; we want to relate to the protagonist.
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Truth is the daughter of time, not authority.