Charlotte Gray Quotes
"Flying by night was a violation of instinct; there were no steeples or bridges from which to take a bearing, no flash of wingtip or underbelly to show the vital presence of other aircraft."
"His Hurricane carried four 20 mm Hispano cannons, known to their admirers as ‘tank-busters’, and four 250 lb bombs in place of its regular machine guns."
"He breathed in and dropped the speed again, safe above the Channel waters."
"If at least his feet had been warm, that might have stopped his body heat from leaking out onto the frozen rudder bars."
"The memory of happiness was never lost; the difficulty was to re-establish the connection when the thread appeared to have been broken."
"It had fused ideas of love and national honour to the memory of a kind of earthly paradise – a bell ringing on the garden gate, a little phrase in a sonata – that had been betrayed from the inside."
"They have sold the honour of the country. That exquisite civilisation that took so long to bring to flower."
"She felt as though she had stepped outside the normal scope of daily life."
"It’s all quite different from the fast-reaction daytime flying he had been taught, where you took your bearings from the ground or from other planes that you could see."
"You have to trust people, Charlotte. Come on."
"No sane human being should feel like this, so soon, before anything has happened – if ever."
"What we have to do now is decide on our plan of action."
"It’s like an illness. No sane human being should feel like this, so soon, before anything has happened – if ever."
"Try not to look so amazed, Charlotte. It’s not polite."
"I think you might do better to have a few little flings rather than jump straight in at the deep end."
"The thought of Nazi uniforms in French streets and villages makes me feel quite ill."
"The Occupation has provided ideal circumstances for the shrewd businessman."
"Life will resume. There will be full hotels and rich clients."
"The line, to Pauline Bobotte’s irritation, went dead."
"Charlotte waited an hour and twenty minutes, dressed as Dominique Guilbert."
"The high ceilings and the bare floors made it noisy."
"He filled a small flask with brandy and slipped it into the pocket of the old leather jacket."
"Julien clattered down the stairs, forgetting as always, until it was too late, that his footsteps would cause a scuffling."
"I don’t like to let them downstairs, that’s the nuisance of it."
"Julien sighed. ‘We’ll have to try to work something out.’"
"Charlotte was filled with a sudden certainty that she was going to feel sick."
"The pilot seemed to be having difficulty in getting the heavy bomber on line."
"The ground hit her while she was still swinging, much before she expected."
"Super. If you’re quite ready, then, I think we’ll make our move."
"The peculiar thing about this plane was that it seemed to be pointing downwards."
"She thought of how she had sat in Monsieur Loiseau’s shady garden with her book."
"The society encouraged by the uncritical articles was one of camp fires, khaki shorts and breeding."
"Charlotte looked out of the window while he examined the identity card of Dominique Guilbert."
"I didn’t realise both how normal everything would be and yet how strange."
"‘Leave them for the time being,’ said Mlle Cariteau. ‘We can manage.’"
"I think it will come when the majority of people change their minds about the likely outcome of the war."
"We’re very self-sufficient. There’s a bit less to eat, I suppose, but we manage pretty well."
"I’m sure we could find somewhere a bit more cheerful. Shall we go and explore?"
"I’m fond of him. Then about six months ago my brother asked me if I would help him in a little network of people he was putting together with an Englishman who had dropped out of the sky one day."
"Charlotte looked at the faded floral wallpaper ahead of her: there is no point in dinner without you."
"Are we going to carry on from where we were yesterday?"
"Absolutely. I’m meeting my fiancée at the station. She’s just arrived from Lyon."
"The sight released in Charlotte the memory of another such street, one she had seen as a child on her first excursion across the Channel with her father."
"Charlotte had not foreseen this: so preoccupied had she been by her own safety that it had not occurred to her that Gregory’s contact might be suspicious of her."
"She leaned forwards and tapped Chollet on the back. He stood up and turned round to face her again."
"Charlotte tried to make herself cry, to evoke pity that way, but tears were far away."
"The fear of discovery and the exhilaration of penetrating Chollet’s defences now gave way to despair."
"I’m British,' she said. ‘I’m not an informer, I’m not with any Vichy organisation."
"She had identified her own troubles with those of the country in which she found herself."
"Charlotte felt the emotions surge up and animate her movements; her hands were clawing at the air, rotating, and there was a flush rising in her neck, creeping over her jaw."
"I didn’t realise it was like that. There didn’t seem to be enough hours in the day."
"But that wasn’t why I came here to find him. I came because I loved him, because the feeling was … transcendent."
"Not every woman would have felt what I felt. It was my weaknesses and faults, my own wounds he touched. That’s why I so passionately loved him."
"It was enough to be with him, to have his company. It was almost enough that he was alive, even if I was not with him."
"A wise woman doesn’t indulge such fantasies about a fighter pilot in a war."
"If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you... How do you pass the time until you die?"
"The passion, that thing people call 'merely physical', is perhaps rarer than what they refer to as lasting love."
"If only the one you loved didn’t live so far away."
"By language men have made a show of congregation or society, because the individual is not born with language but learns to navigate with its means."
"No child born knows the world he is entering, and at the moment of his birth he is a stranger to his parents."
"The prospect of action seemed to have restored Julien’s old humour."
"‘They call it "rutabaga",’ Julien explained."
"Charlotte, who recognised it as swede, wanted to tell them that where she came from it was considered a delicacy when accompanying the haggis."
"Charlotte watched the sky, picking out the tilted saucepan of the Great Bear."
"Above their heads was a narrow crescent moon in a sky almost yellow with the light of sludgy galaxies."
"I’m a loyal citizen. Sylvie doesn’t tell me anything."
"‘I think I’m dreaming for two,’ Charlotte told Levade."
"‘I will stick by my own decisions,’ she valiantly thought."
"Charlotte felt embarrassed by the difference she presumed in their feelings."
"If you don’t tell the truth, we’ll have to look elsewhere."
"It’s my business to know the whereabouts of children."
"The numbers in the camps are disappointing, so the police have been scouring the fields and villages."
"Evil is easy; it has countless forms, while good is almost unique."
"I think my father will be pleased to die. I think he has no fear of it."
"If you fight in a war you take the risk of being killed."
"If you don’t base your actions on what is right, then you have nothing left to fall back on if the practicalities fail."
"All will be well; all manner of things will be well."
"How tired my long, long caution has made me."
"It was the fattiness of the goose that obviously appealed to people who had been so long deprived of oil or butter."
"A family tree of jazz singers, rich industrialists or institutionalised lunatics."
"It was only its own intensity that was important – that, and the value she allowed it in the battle for an understanding of her life."
"Perhaps there truly was something they had seen."
"Her crisis was as perpetual and as comic as theirs."
"I'm just a romantic girl who's come to find her lost lover."
"The best thing you can do for me today and every day."
"To some extent you are what other people think you are."
"Her heart was thudding so hard that it was making her palms tingle."
"The only thing she could think of to describe his attitude was ‘friendly’."
"I have friends, I have brothers who are like me."
"I think you've certainly caught us with our trousers down."
"You poor thing, you’ve had a rough time, haven’t you?"
"I was happy to resign from G Section at once."
"I'm quite used to our people popping up in the most unexpected places."
"She hated the thought that she of all people should be abandoning the boys."
"The house outside Edinburgh, where her parents now lived, held no interest for her by comparison."
"I will return in good health, quite soon, I think."
"She had not imagined fathers to feel such vulnerability."
"Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves."
"One of the reasons she had so much valued the company of friends as a child was that, with them, she felt liberated and at ease, while at home she felt reduced."
"Gray opened a bottle of wine he had long been saving and drank to his daughter’s safe return."