The Huntress Quotes
"You fear nothing, you get stupid. It’s better to fear one thing, Nina Borisovna. Put all the terror into that, and it leaves you just careful enough."
"Because people aren’t obliged to drag out their old hurts or dirty laundry just because of your need to know."
"If they can’t hear you coming, they’ll never lay hands on you."
"Objectively, that is one of the best shots you’ve ever taken. Subjectively, that shot is goddamn spooky."
"She’s a widow," her father said at last. To Jordan’s delight, he was blushing."
"I have no interest in your orders," he said quietly. "I have no interest if it was legal at the time. I have no interest in your excuses."
"You take classes for it—picture-taking?" "Wherever I can."
"I breed lunatics," Nina’s father said when he was deep into the vodka.
"I work for English pilot. He comes out of RAF, starts a little airfield. I help."
"What is the opposite of drowning? Flying. Because if you were soaring free in the air, water could never close over your head."
"You might fall, you might die, but you would never drown."
"Everything needs you dead and everybody wants to leave."
"I saw women in the revolution who could saw a man’s head off without batting an eye."
"Trouble always finds us, but we eat trouble alive."
"Wars are terrible, but they need people like me."
"It’s easier letting you fill the stewpot when you were home—girls are supposed to look after their fathers."
"I’m not avenging the heavy centuries of anything by being a damn nurse."
"You come from Irkutsk? Yes. No, Baikal. Then Irkutsk."
"Nothing scares me. I am tougher than any university girl with a perfect record and a thousand hours of flying time."
"I did carry my father’s medal at the wedding. It was the only thing I had of his."
"Ruth’s parents were struck down; she was left behind. My father was struck down; I was left behind."
"I fought for Ruth like she was my own, and that was when I knew she’d been sent to me."
"I wanted no part of Germany or Austria after the war. I wanted a fresh start."
"Death is everyday; survival is a theater trick."
"I saw my first plane, and I fell in love with it."
"I don’t lose nerve," she said, "Not at sixty-five meters."
"What does make you lose your nerve?" Ian asked.
"Ever since then, you might say I’ve had a little trouble with heights."
"We’re not finished until we fail, and we haven’t failed yet."
"Principle should be stronger than the need for vengeance."
"You’ve got a savage in there too, you just pretend he’s never coming off the leash."
"We are not a damned death squad. We are better than that."
"What’s more likely, missy? That she has a father and a name she’s too ashamed to claim, or that she’s some kind of Nazi schemer?"
"I haven’t always been petrified of high places, after all."
"Is good to have one fear, luchik, but just one."
"I’m not leaving my pilot. Navigator’s first job."
"A good smart girl like you, who picked yourself out a good smart man and a good smart future—a daughter like that deserves pearls."
"I don’t care if I only fly a U-2 and not a Yak."
"Thinking about after the wedding was almost impossible, like the crest of a hill she couldn’t see beyond."
"The last thing Jordan was going to do was make wild speculations about anyone’s past."
"I’m sure it’s just his nerves, Dad. The war, you know."
"I’m so bloody bored I could jump over the rail."
"She used to do something unbelievably vague in British intelligence, and people like that are rather good at observing things."
"It wasn’t fear, she was just frozen as though swallowed in ice."
"You don’t understand, that’s all. You don’t see. You grew up so differently."
"All the while wanting to scream Of course he suffered! He hung on for two weeks after the accident, you think he didn’t suffer_?"
"If that’s what Americans serve in diners, no wonder they’re all crazy."
"They make me very fearful, and I babble. Very unlike me."
"A rusalka only comes out in the night, dressed in the lake. And if you cross her, she will kill you."
"You’re in the land of the brave and the home of the free now, boss, it’s time to abandon cricket."
"I suppose as a married man, this moment was inevitable."
"Everything just lying here? For sale, to anyone?"
"Decadent industrialist filth. Everything my Komsomol meetings ever said, how the West is wasteful and corrupt."
"Try not to comment on capitalist or socialist anything where anyone can hear you."
"Russian men only wait four hours queuing for vodka."
"You look like an executioner who knows her shorthand."
"Deserves to wrap fish guts on a whaler and filter gasoline into jerricans."
"Make it scotch and you’re welcome to try, you little Cossack."
"I have a few questions for you, Fritz. Do be a good chap and cooperate."
"I was a member of the party, but it wasn’t like you make it sound."
"Your papers are false. You’re a war criminal."
"You cataloged stolen books while the people who owned them were shipped off in cattle cars."
"I’m not really interested in you, Fritzie. Give me some names, and I’ll forget I know yours."
"I don’t care where the water is, just get me off it!"
"We stall out over water again, you’ll get me out of it."
"The van can’t come for you in the air, Galya, so what do you fear up here?"
"They don’t like anyone wants to live next door to them."
"We’re good together. But is it love, or is it habit?"
"Innocence did not mean safety; everyone knew that."
"What does it matter how it had happened? It happened."
"The innocent, of course, have nothing to fear at the hands of..."
"Even a good Soviet citizen feels fear at the prospect of an arrest."
"The Motherland and Comrade Stalin and all the rest can fuck themselves through seven gates whistling."
"I don’t care about the Motherland, Yelena. She’s a frozen mass of dirt."
"If the good ones leave, who’s here to make it better after the war?"
"I wonder what you were, before you became Vernon Waggoner of Woonsocket, Rhode Island."
"A camp clerk? A Gestapo guard? One of those Reich doctors who culled the unfit from the ranks of the master race?"
"We come back for this mudak some other time. We know where he is, what he looks like. Later, after die Jägerin, we get him. Whoever he is."
"Nina Markova, a hurricane in compact female form, outer chaos whirling around an eye of silent, startling serenity."
"I’d have slit that German’s throat whether you were there to save, or not. But you’re welcome."
"I’m no Pulitzer, but I’ll fall at your feet."
"I had no idea how hungry I was for someone to talk to until this oddly bilingual English boy dropped out of nowhere."
"You’re Tony Rodomovsky. I like all your parts, and don’t you dare make that into a smutty joke."
"I thought we were just having a mad summer fling."
"Survival now for citizenship later. What do you say?"
"I can’t afford to fire him. He has made us a great deal of money, Jordan; he was quite correct about that."
"I’m not giving that up. If I can just figure out what will make you want to stay."
"How the hell did you woo a woman as impervious as a bullet?"
"Be moved by the goddamned romance of it all, would you?"
"Love isn’t the word. I’m not sure there’s a word in the world for what you are to me."
"I don’t want to shoot you, Jordan, but I will if I have to."
"So hit her hard before she recovers herself."
"Nina is the one who got away. It haunted her."
"Because I said Nina would never stay in Europe, that she hates it."
"Much harder to escape from the middle of the Atlantic."
"I don’t think Anna will try to run, not with Nina watching."
"Why can’t I turn it off, what I felt for her?"
"I think maybe we put off divorce for a year."
"You don’t get to die. I am not that merciful."
"I’ll make her so famous they won’t have a choice."