Elizabeth Wein Quotes
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One moment flying in green sunlight, then the sky suddenly grey and dark.
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It makes you very uncomfortable to realize that your emotional attachment to something is an indulgence.
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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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I really would like to catapult myself back there in time and kick my own teeth in.
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People are complicated. There is so much more to everybody than you realise.
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Bloody Machiavellian English Intelligence Officer playing God.
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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.
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And I envied her that she had chosen her work herself and was doing what she wanted to do. I don't suppose I had any idea what I 'wanted' and so I was chosen, not choosing. There's glory and honor in being chosen. But not much room for free will.
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It's impossible to stall a Lizzie.
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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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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.
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How do you ever hold on to anybody?
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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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It is incredible what you do, knowing you have to.
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Looking up at the stars and smoking in silence.
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And this, even more wonderful and mysterious, is also true: when I read it, when I read what Julie's written, she is instantly alive again, whole and undamaged. With her words in my mind while I'm reading, she is as real as I am. Gloriously daft, drop-dead charming, full of bookish nonsense and foul language, brave and generous. She's right here. Afraid and exhausted, alone, but fighting. Flying in silver moonlight in a plane that can't be landed, stuck in the climb—alive, alive, ALIVE.
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A poet and a doctor. Maybe I could. This the first thought I have of it. Maybe I could.
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Incredible what slender threads you begin to hang your hopes on.
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I need complicated railroad journeys and people speaking to me in foreign languages to keep me happy. I want to see the world and write stories about everything I see.
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It's like being raised by wolves -- you don't realize you're not one yourself until someone points it out to you. Sometimes it makes me so mad that not everyone treats me just like another wolf.
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Truth is the daughter of time, not authority.
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With her words in my mind while I'm reading, she is as real as I am. Gloriously daft, drop-dead charming, full of bookish nonsense and foul language, brave and generous. She's right here. Afraid and exhausted, alone, but fighting.
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I sometimes think young people are not given nearly enough credit for their ability to appreciate literary flourish.
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High time they put the RAF in kilts.