Elizabeth Wein Quotes
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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.
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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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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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These are just stories, you know. They are part of what we are, but they are not the real thing. All this year I’ve been thinking, What would White Raven do? And today, every time I thought it, I just didn’t care what White Raven would do. So today I’ve just done what I would do. I’ve just done what I think is right. I’m not going to stop making up stories. But I’m thinking now that they aren’t just for pretending to be someone else, someone more exciting, someone braver than you really are. They are not always jut a maze to get lost in so you can run away from life. They can just as well be maps to help you navigate.
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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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I have nothing to lose. I am going to dare it. I will aim for the sun.
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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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Sometimes I feel as if the only thing I can do is write. It helps me think.
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Hope is the most treacherous thing in the world. It lifts you and lets you plummet. But as long as you're being lifted you don't worry about plummeting.
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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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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.
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But mainly, so very, very stupid. I desperately want to grow old.
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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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We are a sensational team.
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I think that what I do is a form of pathetic fallacy, the literary trope in which nature is in sympathy with the mood of the story. I connect the physical setting and props in the story to the emotional state of the characters.
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The Rosalie really did not want to go like the clappers and performed its usual consumptive drama every time we came to an uphill slope, coughing and gasping like a dying Dickens heroine, and finally just stopped—engine still gasping a bit but the car just stopped. Simply could not move forward up the hill. Choke full out but cylinders firing pathetically as though we were trying to make the poor thing run on nothing but air.
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Hope is treacherous, but how can you live without it?
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I am quite Pan-like in my naïve confidence that he will play by the rules and keep his word.
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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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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.
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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.
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Even when you’re flying high and steady, the weight doesn’t go away—it’s just balanced by lift. I have worked pretty hard over the past year and a half to keep my life in balance. But the weight’s still there, waiting for an increase in gravity to pull me earthward again.
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Things became more civilized all of a sudden. Coffee does that. Or maybe it is women who do that.
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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.