Rose Under Fire

"I just got back from Celia Forester's funeral. I'm supposed to be writing up an official report for the Tempest she flew into the ground, since she's obviously not going to write it herself and I saw it happen. And also because I feel responsible. I know it wasn't my fault—I really do know that now. But I briefed her. We both had Tempests to deliver, and I'd flown one a couple times before. Celia hadn't. She took of ten minutes after me. If she'd taken off first, we might both still be alive."

"Horrible war. So much more horrible here than back in the States. Every few weeks someone's mother or brother or another friend is killed. And already I am fed up with the shortages, never any butter and never enough sleep. The combination of working so hard and the constant fear, and just the general blahness of everything—I wasn't prepared for it. But how could I possibly, possibly have been prepared for it? They've been living with it for five years."

"Careless talk costs lives."

"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."

"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."

"[W]ords on a page are like oxygen to a petrol engine, firing up ghosts."

"Your brain does amazing acrobatics when it doesn't want to believe something."

"Lift is made when the air pressure under a wing is greater than the air pressure over the wing. Then the wing gets pushed upward. That's how birds fly. That's how kites fly—a kite is basically just a solitary wing. That's how airplanes fly. But people need lift, too. People don't get moving, they don't achieve great heights, without something buoying them up."

"Things don't magically take off and fly just because it's a little windy."

""It needs thrust," I said. "You have to run with it. Can you run?" She [Róża] gave me a dirty look. Then she broke out into the bubbly champagne laugh. She turned and ran, limping but steady. She laughed over her shoulder, letting out line as I held the kite over my head. "Run with me, Rose," she cried."

"I have never read a book that humanized history as well as Elizabeth Wein’s Rose Under Fire has."

"Rose Under Fire is one hell of a book. It’s a powerful, emotionally resonant historical novel about remembering and about surviving, and I truly appreciate and value that."