Quotes from Elizabeth Wein

I, of course, took the opportunity to interpose with pigheaded Wallace pride, 'I am not English, you ignorant Jerry bastard, I am a SCOT.

She has the filthiest tongue of any woman in France. Burn her mouth clean.

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.

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.

Maddie quickly pulled down the blackout curtains over her bright and vulnerable soul.

Queenie, herself again, took hold of Maddie's hand and squeezed it tightly. She walked all the way back across the airfield without letting it go. Maddie closed her eyes and flew again in the ethereal pale green light. She knew she would never let it go.

It's impossible to stall a Lizzie.

A poet and a doctor. Maybe I could. This the first thought I have of it. Maybe I could.

Godless as I am, I pray she's got away with it. It's like ripples in a pond, isn't it? It doesn't stop in one place.

unless you were doing them a favor by killing them. Then, you'd let them down if you didn't , if you couldn't make yourself.

Taran. We go down fighting.

Her own hair was a glory of copper fire that morning, shining like a whisky still, long and loose in gentle flames down her back.

And you know, it was like I was breathing my own self back into me to say these word,s to remember that these things existed--the green trees of the eastern woodland at home in North America, their strong and supple branches, sunlight through the trees.

How can you grow to love a handful of strangers so fiercely just because you have to sleep on the same couple of wooden planks with them, when half the time you were there you wanted to strangle them, and all you ever talked about is death and imaginary strawberries?

Se parece a enamorarse, saber que acabas de encontrar a tu mejor amiga.

Las personas somos complicadas. Hay mucho más en nuestro interior de lo que se percibe a simple vista.

If you're scared, do something.

More than anything else, I think, Maddie went to war on behalf of the Holy Island seals.

Julie would have died there.

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.

You just have to be careful with Momma for a while," Teo told me. "She's broken. Like a jug with a broken handle that you try to glue back together. It looks all right, and it'll still hold water. It's still a good jug. But you better not ever try to pick it up by the handle. You have to wait for the glue to dry, and even then it might not hold.

Kiss me, Hardy

Everything I know about passive resistance I learned from Micheline. She always appeared to be doing exactly as she was told, but everything she did took twice as long as it should have.

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.