Elizabeth Wein Quotes
-
How do you ever hold on to anybody?
-
So, I have no sense of direction. In some of us it is a TRAGIC FLAW.
-
Looking up at the stars and smoking in silence.
-
A part of me will always be unflyable, stuck in the climb.
-
Sometimes I feel as if the only thing I can do is write. It helps me think.
-
I sometimes think young people are not given nearly enough credit for their ability to appreciate literary flourish.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I seem to be good at asking for trouble.
-
She gave a low and delighted chuckle. Her eyes were black as a moonless December night and reflected the electric lights like stars.
-
Things became more civilized all of a sudden. Coffee does that. Or maybe it is women who do that.
-
It's very modern. Very gamine. You look like a jazz singer.
-
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.
-
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.
-
It was a nightmare I could never really define, to have so many people packed around me and not be able to communicate with any of them unless they felt like it.
-
High time they put the RAF in kilts.
-
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.
-
It is incredible what you do, knowing you have to.
-
It is possible there are some things you want so badly that you will change your life to make them happen.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Stars poked through like holes in the cloth of the sky and shed no light on anything.