Top 90 Elizabeth Wein Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wein

52. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wein

53. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wein

54. “That is a terrifically intimate thing, you know? Letting a stranger light your cigarette. Leaning forward so he can hold a flame to your lips. Pausing to breathe in before you pull back again.”

— Elizabeth Wein

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

— Elizabeth Wein

56. “It’s very modern. Very gamine. You look like a jazz singer.”

— Elizabeth Wein

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

— Elizabeth Wein

58. “That’s why we like to make things pretty; it’s just’cause we’re so dang sick of cleaning up horrible messes. Same instinct.”

— Elizabeth Wein

59. “He just put his hand through the bulkhead, exactly as she’d done, and squeezed my shoulder. He has very strong fingers. And he kept his hand there the whole way home, even when he was reading the map and giving me headings. So I am not flying alone now after all.”

— Elizabeth Wein

60. “It is so hard trying to say what you mean.”

— Elizabeth Wein

61. “I have nothing to lose. I am going to dare it. I will aim for the sun.”

— Elizabeth Wein

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

— Elizabeth Wein

63. “I realized I would be forced to run away from home if someone tried to arrange a marriage for me. I didn’t want to think about it.”

— Elizabeth Wein

64. “Julie would have died there.”

— Elizabeth Wein

65. “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?”

— Elizabeth Wein

66. “Emmy and I are still Habte Sadek’s favorite foreigners, and it is all because I wanted to look at his feet when I was eleven years old! But it never hurts to be polite to people.”

— Elizabeth Wein

67. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wein

68. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wein

69. “It is incredible what you do, knowing you have to.”

— Elizabeth Wein

70. “Must stop. This ink is amazing, it really doesn’t smear, even when you cry on it.”

— Elizabeth Wein

71. “I loved that phrase: soul mate. We asked Grandma what it meant and she said, ‘Two people who understand each other without talking about it. Two halves of a whole.”

— Elizabeth Wein

72. “Och, they suit you, Queenie! Promise me you’ll wear them.”

— Elizabeth Wein

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

— Elizabeth Wein

74. “Spiderwebs joined together can catch a lion.”

— Elizabeth Wein

75. “But mainly, so very, very stupid. I desperately want to grow old.”

— Elizabeth Wein

76. “It’s impossible to stall a Lizzie.”

— Elizabeth Wein

77. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wein

78. “If you’re scared, do something.”

— Elizabeth Wein

79. “But she did it. Because you do. It is incredible what you do, knowing you have to. A.”

— Elizabeth Wein

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

— Elizabeth Wein

81. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wein

82. “Driving like a man is one of her few foibles.”

— Elizabeth Wein

83. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wein

84. “In trust and wisdom you can be as far superior to anyone as you dare make yourself.”

— Elizabeth Wein

85. “I seem to be good at asking for trouble.”

— Elizabeth Wein

86. “There is no end,” I said. “Only the beginning of something else.”

— Elizabeth Wein

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

— Elizabeth Wein

88. “Don’t you think it makes them stronger when you give them someone to despise?”

— Elizabeth Wein

89. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wein

90. “Patriotism is not enough – I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone.” She.”

— Elizabeth Wein

91. “A woman did that.”

— Elizabeth Wein

92. “How do you ever hold on to anybody?”

— Elizabeth Wein

93. “Looking up at the stars and smoking in silence.”

— Elizabeth Wein

94. “She gave a low and delighted chuckle. Her eyes were black as a moonless December night and reflected the electric lights like stars.”

— Elizabeth Wein

95. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wein