Elizabeth Wein Quotes
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Doing the thing you are scared of is much harder than not being afraid of anything. It is easy to be brave. It is not so easy to be scared and do a brave thing anyway.
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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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Stars poked through like holes in the cloth of the sky and shed no light on anything.
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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.
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High time they put the RAF in kilts.
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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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In trust and wisdom you can be as far superior to anyone as you dare make yourself.
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I am like a ruined piece of parchment scrawled over and over again with your name, so many times it has become illegible.
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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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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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A poet and a doctor. Maybe I could. This the first thought I have of it. Maybe I could.
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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.
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Von Loewe really should know me well enough by now to realize that I am not going to face my execution without a fight. Or with anything remotely resembling dignity.
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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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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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Hope—you think of hope as a bright thing, a strong thing, sustaining. But it’s not. It’s the opposite. It’s simply this: lumps of stale bread stuck down your shirt. Stale gray bread eked out with ground fish bones, which you won’t eat because you’re going to give it away, and maybe you’ll get a message through to your friend.
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If you're scared, do something.
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Don't know how I kept going. You just do. You have to, so you do.
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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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I seem to be good at asking for trouble.
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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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Spiderwebs joined together can catch a lion.
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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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When you’re flying, the changing balance of lift and weight pulls you up or down. But another pair of forces pulls you forward or backward through the air: thrust and drag. Thrust is the power that pulls the kite forward—you run with it to get it up in the air. You have to have thrust to create lift. Drag is there because your kite’s surfaces push against the air and slow the kite down. Drag doesn’t pull you out of the sky; it makes you fly more slowly.