The Rose Code Quotes
"It's not enough to look scrummy, I want to outshine a princess, an actual born-to-the-tiara princess, and the fact is, I can't."
"Stop that. Do not fall in the dismals, Osla Kendall."
"Who knows what I'll be doing now. I was called to interview in London, and then the strangest summons arrived telling me to go to Bletchley station."
"I work in a blinking madhouse. It's a small madhouse tucked inside a larger one."
"I've never lived in a single flat with a loo inside."
"It's all important. And it's only your first day."
"If these walls could talk, they'd tell you stories of code and cipher, of bravery behind the scenes."
"In the silence of these halls, we waged a silent war, a battle of wits against an unseen enemy."
"And good luck to anyone else trying to get a word in."
"It’s got my future husband in it somewhere. I’ve never seen so many eligible bachelors in my life."
"Dear Philip: It’s a madhouse, and maybe my job’s a touch undemanding . . . but I think I like it here."
"If Bletchley Park had a motto, Mab thought, it would be You dinnae need to know."
"Claybourn secretarial course, top of my class."
"Keine besonderen Ereignisse," said the girl to Mab’s left. "You’ll see that one now and then. It means ‘no special developments.’"
"What’s a girl to do for fun round here when shift’s over?"
"I vote for Conan Doyle," the huge dark-haired man on Beth’s right was saying. "Who doesn’t like Sherlock Holmes?"
"There are plans to organize a mobile section of GC & CS," Miss Senyard told her girls.
"There’s a theory that crossword types, maths types, and chess-playing types are good at our sort of work."
"I don’t want a yard of Wrens all looking the same—"
"Makes no difference. That’s how it happens. Now we have this, we’ll get the rest quicker."
"I thought you were coming over tonight," His voice lowered. "Staying over."
"You can lie in those sheets till you’ve pissed them, you little cow."
"You don’t really have to. Doing this work is a bit like driving a car without having a clue what’s under the bonnet."
"It’s not a game." Beth had never felt so shy, slow, stilted, and stuck in her life.
"I’ve turned more schoolgirls into first-rate rodders than I can count."
"It’s odds to make you weep, which is why we must think of it as a game."
"Your shoes, Miss Churt, proved broken beyond repair. I hope you will allow me to replace them."
"You can’t—have it," Osla heard herself scream, but her limbs were moving with jerky uncertainty.
"I’m not Philip, sweetheart. What’s your name?"
"Like Ozma of Oz?" The man’s voice was light, soothing. "Sit down, Ozma, and let me see if you’re hurt. Then we’ll get you back to the Emerald City, right as rain."
"I don’t care if he is. Christ, the blood in your hair..."
"Home is where there’s an invitation or a cousin."
"It wasn’t enough anymore just to fight, to do her part for this country she loved and take her fun where she could."
"We can take you to the doctor, miss, but you’ll wait hours while they see the bad cases first."
"Wars are cyclical. It shouldn’t surprise anyone when they come round again."
"Every man and woman will therefore prepare himself to do his duty..."
"I could do this all day and be fresh at the end. It’s just the old mortal frame that gets in the way."
"Weapons are no good unless you know when and where to aim them."
"She wanted impossible work that her brain converted to the possible by the simple process of wringing itself inside out until the job was done."
"Clockwell was a place of the living dead, Beth thought. The asylum broke human souls."
"Sometimes, if it got you something you needed, you offered."
"Anyone who says you can’t get knocked up if it’s your first time—wrong."
"The only thing that stops you getting knocked up is if a man wears a French letter."
"Things will be different after the war. They have to be."
"Gentlemen don’t try to put the make on girls like Osla."
"You care more for a dog and a job than your own mother."
"You didn’t have to take that job. They don’t need you!"
"Give me a pencil and a crib, and I’ll crack the world."
"Just because I write gossip-page fluff, it does not mean I have fluff between the ears."
"I’m not ever going to have my Jack past the occasional evening he’s on leave from the RAF, and Harry won’t put you or any woman above Christopher."
"There was a time we were planning to separate and get a quiet divorce, once we realized it wasn’t ever going to be love between us."
"That traffic is everything. It’s not just that we can’t keep the Americans safe without it. We don’t get the convoys full of supplies without it."
"If you’re the one my husband’s lost his head over, you can call me Sheila."
"Don’t regret never getting to know the boy in that photograph. He was an idiot."
"You’re still just like him. There’s a sort of staring-into-space thing you were doing when I saw you outside the grocer’s."
"I’ve enjoyed your company before then, because you were lovely and entertaining. A pleasant companion on a night out."
"But it’s beginning to part more often than it did. When you lift an eyebrow skeptically. When I sink into you and feel you arch against me."
"I smuggled out a few blank pieces of paper to prove how easily it could be done."
"I will not be labeled an outsider, and I will not be accused of being untrustworthy."
"I would never have helped myself to a file of reports against all rules and regulations."
"I am as careful and clever a worker as you have ever hired at Bletchley Park."
"It would be better for BP if you broke things off with this fellow altogether."
"A girl like her couldn’t be trusted to keep her mouth shut around her boyfriend, so just break things off, you silly socialite."
"The spark is snuffed—and then another, too—Too fragile-fine to flame above the rue."
"She wouldn’t tell Philip why she’d stopped writing."
"Grief didn’t make you noble. It made you selfish and hateful."
"The only reason she’d returned to Bletchley Park was because it was work here or do service elsewhere."
"Perhaps life wasn’t exactly exciting anymore; there were no great sweeps of passion or purpose to her days, but there was no grief or stress, either."
"Adventure, excitement, passion; those things were unreliable."
"I’ve gone a little mad, mad as the Mad Hatter."
"Hating Osla was less complicated, more comforting—and avoiding her was child’s play."
"Sorry. Everyone told her they were sorry. Why didn’t they tell her how to go on living, instead?"
"I miss my ladies," the imagined Dilly said wistfully.
"I never knew what Beth did until I came there."
"Our brains work a certain way—a way that makes us useful."
"I'm no princess, Philip," she said at last. "You've already got one."
"Cancel leave, cancel meals, cancel sleep. The day is set."
"Churchill famously referred to them as 'the geese who laid the golden eggs, but never cackled.'"
"The biggest bloody lunatic asylum in Britain."
"Without the achievements of the people who so thoroughly cracked the supposedly uncrackable Enigma codes used by the Axis powers, the war might very well have been lost."
"Churchill relied heavily on Park intelligence to guide his public policy."
"The burden of secrecy took its toll: illness, burnout, and breakdowns were common among BP staff."
"Women enjoyed a level of equality with male coworkers that they were unlikely to get on the outside for years or decades."
"BP might have appalled military personnel with its casual attitudes to dress, language, and first-naming, but it was in many ways a haven of acceptance."
"The idea that a husband and wife could both work at Bletchley Park without realizing it at the time or telling each other afterward might seem like a soap opera twist, but it really happened, and more than once."
"There are undoubtedly stories—ciphers broken, off-the-books meetings convened, betrayals covered up—that have been taken to the grave."