Quotes from Elizabeth Wein

Ró?a laughed until she broke off choking. 'Oh, so now that I've got a decent coat I'm supposed to stay in the plane with the crazy taran pilots!' 'Oh, Ró?yczka.' I sighed, too. I didn't know how to explain to her that she could stop fighting now. Or stop fighting us , anyway.

It's like being in love, discovering your best friend.

I am like a ruined piece of parchment scrawled over and over again with your name, so many times it has become illegible.

A woman did that.

I really would like to catapult myself back there in time and kick my own teeth in.)

It is incredible what you do, knowing you have to.

I wish you could go through life without ever caring about anything, without ever getting attached to people and dreams and inaccessible places. It just makes you sad when you can never go back.

It is possible there are some things you want so badly that you will change your life to make them happen.

it never occurred to him that now he was looking at his master, at the one person in all the world who held his fate right between her palms-- me, in patched hand-me-downs and untrimmed hair and idiot smile-- and that my hatred for him is pure and black and unforgiving.

I am quite Pan-like in my naïve confidence that he will play by the rules and keep his word.

She tried not to think about what it would be like running across the airfield to the radio room an hour from now, under fire. But she did it. Because you do. It is incredible what you do, knowing you have to.

Things became more civilized all of a sudden. Coffee does that. Or maybe it is women who do that.

There is no end," I said. "Only the beginning of something else.

Stars poked through like holes in the cloth of the sky and shed no light on anything.

You know, it set you at war with yourself.

For the pleasure of giving, because what's the point of just having? If I give a thing, I remember how happy we both were when I made the gift.

Spiderwebs joined together can catch a lion.

Maddie held her lightly, thinking she would let go when her friend stopped crying. But she cried for so long that Maddie fell asleep first. So she didn't ever let go.

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.

I am no longer afraid of getting old. Indeed I can't believe I ever said anything so stupid. So childish. So offensive and arrogant. But mainly, so very, very stupid. I desperately want to grow old.

She was never so petty. She did not dabble with minnows at the surface when there were thirty-pound salmon swimming deeper down.

This is what's so heartbreaking: the fact that I am here, alive, has no doubt given Fernande some grain of hope for her daughter. But the fact that I was there makes me sure there isn't any.

Where I fail in accuracy, I hope I make up for it in plausibility.

Equality comes in different forms, and it is a lot harder being a girl in Ethiopia than it was in Pennsylvania.