Top 90 Elizabeth Wein Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Please come back soon. The window is always open.”

— Elizabeth Wein

2. “Fight with realistic hope, not to destroy all the world’s wrong, but to renew its good.”

— Elizabeth Wein

3. “Careless talk costs lives.”

— Elizabeth Wein

4. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wein

5. “We are a sensational team.”

— Elizabeth Wein

6. “It’s like being in love, discovering your best friend.”

— Elizabeth Wein

7. “And I envied her that she had chosen her work herself and was doing what she wanted to do. I don’t suppose I had any idea what I ‘wanted’ and so I was chosen, not choosing. There’s glory and honor in being chosen. But not much room for free will.”

— Elizabeth Wein

8. “Incredible what slender threads you begin to hang your hopes on.”

— Elizabeth Wein

9. “But a part of me lies buried in lace and roses on a riverbank in France-a part of me is broken off forever. A part of me will be unflyable, stuck in the climb.”

— Elizabeth Wein

10. “There’s glory and honour in being chosen. But not much room for free will.”

— Elizabeth Wein

11. “It was a rather extraordinary conversation if you think about it – both of us speaking in code. But not military code, not Intelligence or Resistance code – just feminine code.”

— Elizabeth Wein

12. “Oh Julie, wouldn’t I know if you were dead? Wouldn’t I feel it happening, like a jolt of electricity to my heart?”

— Elizabeth Wein

13. “But I have told the truth. Isn’t that ironic? They sent me because I am so good at telling lies. But I have told the truth.”

— Elizabeth Wein

14. “A part of me will always be unflyable, stuck in the climb.”

— Elizabeth Wein

15. “Don’t know how I kept going. You just do. You have to, so you do.”

— Elizabeth Wein

16. “Hope is treacherous, but how can you live without it?”

— Elizabeth Wein

17. “Hope is the most treacherous thing in the world. It lifts you and lets you plummet. But as long as you’re being lifted you don’t worry about plummeting.”

— Elizabeth Wein

18. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wein

19. “Kiss me, Hardy!’ Weren’t those Nelson’s last words at the Battle of Trafalgar? Don’t cry. We’re still alive and we make a sensational team.”

— Elizabeth Wein

20. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wein

21. “Truth is the daughter of time, not authority.’” And:.”

— Elizabeth Wein

22. “You can’t just sit in a corner weeping or you’ll die.”

— Elizabeth Wein

23. “There is only one reason I did not go down in flames over the Angers, and that is because I knew I had Julie in the back. Would never have had the presence of mind to put that fire out if I hadn’t been trying to save her life.”

— Elizabeth Wein

24. “Southampton’s barrage balloons floated gleaming in the moonlight like the ghosts of elephants and hippos.”

— Elizabeth Wein

25. “But people need lift, too. People don’t get moving, they don’t soar, they don’t achieve great heights, without someone buoying them up.”

— Elizabeth Wein

26. “Nothing like an arcane literary debate with your tyrannical master while you pass the time leading to your execution.”

— Elizabeth Wein

27. “You know, it set you at war with yourself.”

— Elizabeth Wein

28. “I am in the Special Operations Executive because I can speak French and German and am good at making up stories, and I am a prisoner in the Ormaie Gestapo HQ because I have no sense of direction whatsoever.”

— Elizabeth Wein

29. “If you show this devious little liar one atom’s worth of compassion I will have you shot.”

— Elizabeth Wein

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

— Elizabeth Wein

31. “Which would you rather have––an unlimited supply of Chanel No. 5, or freedom?”

— Elizabeth Wein

32. “One moment flying in green sunlight, then the sky suddenly grey and dark.”

— Elizabeth Wein

33. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wein

34. “The soaring mountains rose around her, and the poets’ waters glittered beneath her in the valleys of memory – hosts of golden daffodils, Swallows and Amazons, Peter Rabbit. She.”

— Elizabeth Wein

35. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wein

36. “Maddie took the top of her egg off. The hot bright yolk was like summer sun breaking through cloud. The first daffodil in the snow. A gold sovereign wrapped in a white silk handkerchief. She dipped her spoon in it and licked it.”

— Elizabeth Wein

37. “It’s an illusion I’ve noticed before – words on a page are like oxygen to a petrol engine, firing up ghosts. It only lasts while the words are in your head. After you put down the paper or pen, the pistons fall lifeless again.”

— Elizabeth Wein

38. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wein

39. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wein

40. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wein

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

— Elizabeth Wein

42. “Taran. We go down fighting.”

— Elizabeth Wein

43. “God knows what I thought! Your brain does amazing acrobatics when it doesn’t want to believe something.”

— Elizabeth Wein

44. “It had never occurred to me that simply being with a fellow prisoner would make me feel like I was still in prison.”

— Elizabeth Wein

45. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wein

46. “I am scared of the way they are clinging to the French and Belgian ports, even though they’ve been pushed out of most of the rest of France. There is something about it that spooks me. They’ve lost.”

— Elizabeth Wein

47. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wein

48. “It makes you very uncomfortable to realize that your emotional attachment to something is an indulgence.”

— Elizabeth Wein

49. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wein

50. “People are complicated. There is so much more to everybody than you realise.”

— Elizabeth Wein