Elizabeth Wein Quotes
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Looking up at the stars and smoking in silence.
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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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Truth is the daughter of time, not authority.
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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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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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I sometimes think young people are not given nearly enough credit for their ability to appreciate literary flourish.
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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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I seem to be good at asking for trouble.
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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.
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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.
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I love the story of a thing. I love a thing for what it means a thousand times more than for what it's worth.
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High time they put the RAF in kilts.
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It is possible there are some things you want so badly that you will change your life to make them happen.
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It's very modern. Very gamine. You look like a jazz singer.
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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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We are a sensational team.
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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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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.
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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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Stars poked through like holes in the cloth of the sky and shed no light on anything.
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Mary Queen of Scots had a little dog, a Skye terrier, that was devoted to her. Moments after Mary was beheaded, the people who were watching saw her skirts moving about and they thought her headless body was trying to get itself to its feet. But the movement turned out to be her dog, which she had carried to the block with her, hidden in her skirts. Mary Stuart is supposed to have faced her execution with grace and courage (she wore a scarlet chemise to suggest she was being martyred), but I don’t think she could have been so brave if she had not secretly been holding tight to her Skye terrier, feeling his warm, silky fur against her trembling skin.
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A whore, we've established that, filthy, it goes without saying, but whatever else the hell I am, I AM NOT ENGLISH.
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In trust and wisdom you can be as far superior to anyone as you dare make yourself.
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Ellen looked around the room with an odd expression, for the first few seconds not taking in the collection spread across the tables, but just taking in the library: the smell of ink and foxy paper and old wood, the green view of the river beyond the leaded casement window propped open just an inch. As if she loved it, but was a little scared to be there.