Code Name Verity Quotes

It's like being in love, discovering your best friend.

KISS ME, HARDY! Kiss me, QUICK!

I am no longer afraid of getting old. Indeed I can't believe I ever said anything so stupid. So childish. So offensive and arrogant. But mainly, so very, very stupid. I desperately want to grow old.

But a part of me lies buried in lace and roses on a riverbank in France-a part of me is broken off forever. A part of me will be unflyable, stuck in the climb.

But I have told the truth. Isn't that ironic? They sent me because I am so good at telling lies. But I have told the truth.

FLY THE PLANE, MADDIE.

Please come back soon. The window is always open.

Don't know how I kept going. You just do. You have to, so you do.

There’s glory and honour in being chosen. But not much room for free will

A whore, we've established that, filthy, it goes without saying, but whatever else the hell I am, I AM NOT ENGLISH.

We are a sensational team

Careless talk costs lives.

It was a rather extraordinary conversation if you think about it -- both of us speaking in code. But not military code, not Intelligence or Resistance code -- just feminine code.

Nothing like an arcane literary debate with your tyrannical master while you pass the time leading to your execution.

Von Loewe really should know me well enough by now to realize that I am not going to face my execution without a fight. Or with anything remotely resembling dignity.

It’s awful, telling it like this, isn’t it? As though we didn’t know the ending. As though it could have another ending. It’s like watching Romeo drink poison. Every time you see it you get fooled into thinking his girlfriend might wake up and stop him. Every single time you see it you want to shout, 'You stupid ass, just wait a minute,' and she’ll open her eyes! 'Oi, you, you twat, open your eyes, wake up! Don’t die this time!' But they always do.

Incredible what slender threads you begin to hang your hopes on.

And this, even more wonderful and mysterious, is also true: when I read it, when I read what Julie's written, she is instantly alive again, whole and undamaged. With her words in my mind while I'm reading, she is as real as I am. Gloriously daft, drop-dead charming, full of bookish nonsense and foul language, brave and generous. She's right here. Afraid and exhausted, alone, but fighting. Flying in silver moonlight in a plane that can't be landed, stuck in the climb—alive, alive, ALIVE.

A part of me will always be unflyable, stuck in the climb.

Oh Julie, wouldn’t I know if you were dead? Wouldn’t I feel it happening, like a jolt of electricity to my heart?

I'M SCOTTISH!

Kiss me, Hardy!’ Weren’t those Nelson’s last words at the Battle of Trafalgar? Don’t cry. We’re still alive and we make a sensational team.

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.

And I envied her that she had chosen her work herself and was doing what she wanted to do. I don't suppose I had any idea what I 'wanted' and so I was chosen, not choosing. There's glory and honor in being chosen. But not much room for free will.

One moment flying in green sunlight, then the sky suddenly grey and dark.

How did you ever get here, Maddie Brodatt?" "'Second to the right, and then straight on till morning,'" she answered promptly-it did feel like Neverland. "Crikey, am I so obviously Peter Pan?" Maddie laughed. "The Lost Boys give it away." Jamie studied his hands. "Mother keeps the windows open in all our bedrooms while we're gone, like Mrs. Darling, just in case we come flying home when she's not expecting us.

I don't believe for a minute-that we wouldn't have become friends somehow-that an unexploded bomb wouldn't have gone off and blown us both into the same crater, or that God himself wouldn't have come along and knocked our heads together in a flash of green sunlight. But it wouldn't have been likely.

The anticipation of what they will do to you is every bit as sickening in a dream as when it is really going to happen.

People are complicated. There is so much more to everybody than you realize. You see someone in school everyday, or at work, in the canteen, and you share a cigarette of a coffee with them, and you talk about the weather or last night's air raid. But you don't talk so much about what was the nastiest thing you ever said to your mother, or how you pretended to be David Balfour, the hero of Kidnapped, for the whole of the year when you were 13, or what you imagine yourself doing with the pilot who looks like Leslie Howard if you were alone in his bunk after a dance.

If I am very lucky - I mean if I am clever about it - I will get myself shot. Here, soon.

There were no route maps posted on the walls, but a Wonderland-style sign commanding, 'If you know where you are, then please tell others.

Must stop. This ink is amazing, it really doesn't smear, even when you cry on it

If you're scared, do something.

I AM A COWARD.

There is only one reason I did not go down in flames over the Angers, and that is because I knew I had Julie in the back. Would never have had the presence of mind to put that fire out if I hadn't been trying to save her life.

She whispered, 'C'etait la Verite?' Was that Verity? Or perhaps she just meant, Was that the truth? Was it true? Did any of it really happen? Were the last three hours real? 'Yes,' I whispered back. 'Oui. C'etait la verite.

We make a sensational team.

Von Linden really should know me well enough by now to realise that I am not going to face my execution without a fight. Or with anything remotely resembling dignity.

Bloody Machiavellian English Intelligence Officer playing God

I don't recognise any of my emotions any more. There's no such thing as plain joy or grief. It's horror and relief and panic and gratitude all jumbled together.

But I've never despised myself so much as I did that day - she was so small and - so fierce, so beautiful, it was like breaking a hawk's wings, stopping up a clear spring with bricks - digging up roses to make space to park your tank. Pointless and ugly.

Look at me!’ I screeched. ‘Look at me, Amadeus von Linden, you sadistic hypocrite, and watch this time! You’re not questioning me now, this isn’t your work, I’m not an enemy agent spewing wireless code! I’m just a minging Scots slag screaming insults at your daughter! So enjoy yourself and watch! Think of Isolde! Think of Isolde and watch!

People are complicated. There is so much more to everybody than you realise.

If you show this devious little liar one atom's worth of compassion I will have you shot.

High time they put the RAF in kilts.

It was wonderful flirting with him, all the razor-edged literary banter, like Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. A battle of wit, and a test, too.

Southampton's barrage balloons floated gleaming in the moonlight like the ghosts of elephants and hippos.

I am in the Special Operations Executive because I can speak French and German and am good at making up stories, and I am a prisoner in the Ormaie Gestapo HQ because I have no sense of direction whatsoever.

The fuss made over the chickens at the checkpoints is not to be believed. Unlike me they had their own papers.

It never occurred to him that now he was looking at his master, at the one person in all the world who held his fate right between her palms - me, in patched hand-me-downs and untrimmed hair and idiot smile - and that my hatred for him is pure and black and unforgiving. And that I don't believe in God, but if I did, if I did, it would be the God of Moses, angry and demanding and OUT FOR REVENGE...

The quick, sudden terror of exploding bombs is not the same as the never-ending, bone-sapping fear of discovery and capture. It never goes away. There isn’t ever any relief, never the possibility of an ‘All Clear’ siren. You always feel a little bit sick inside, knowing the worst might happen at any moment.

She has the filthiest tongue of any woman in France. Burn her mouth clean.

Maddie quickly pulled down the blackout curtains over her bright and vulnerable soul.

What's strange about the whole thing is that although it's riddled with nonsense, altogether it's true - Julie's told our story, mine and hers, our friendship, so truthfully. It is us. We even had the same dream at the same time. How could we have had the same dream at the same time? How can something so wonderful and mysterious be true? But it is. And this, even more wonderful and mysterious, is also true: when I read it, when I read what Julie's written, she is instantly alive again, whole and undamaged. With her words in my mind while I'm reading, she is as real as I am. Gloriously daft, drop-dead charming, full of bookish nonsense and foul language, brave and generous. She's right here. Afraid and exhausted, alone, but fighting. Flying in silver moonlight in a plane that can't be landed, stuck in the climb - alive, alive, ALIVE.

Maddie took the top of her egg off. The hot bright yolk was like summer sun breaking through cloud. The first daffodil in the snow. A gold sovereign wrapped in a white silk handkerchief. She dipped her spoon in it and licked it.

It's impossible to stall a Lizzie.

...unless you were doing them a favor by killing them. Then, you'd let them down if you didn't, if you couldn't make yourself.

Godless as I am, I pray she's got away with it. It's like ripples in a pond, isn't it? It doesn't stop in one place.

Mary Queen of Scots had a little dog, a Skye terrier, that was devoted to her. Moments after Mary was beheaded, the people who were watching saw her skirts moving about and they thought her headless body was trying to get itself to its feet. But the movement turned out to be her dog, which she had carried to the block with her, hidden in her skirts. Mary Stuart is supposed to have faced her execution with grace and courage (she wore a scarlet chemise to suggest she was being martyred), but I don’t think she could have been so brave if she had not secretly been holding tight to her Skye terrier, feeling his warm, silky fur against her trembling skin.

Jamie let go of me. "Shut your mucky gob, man." He stepped close to our fearless leader in the dark, took hold of his jacket by the collar, and in a dead quiet voice that had gone dangerously Scots, threatened heatedly, "Talk like that again wi' these brave lassies listenin' an' Ah'll tear the filthy English tongue frae yer heid, so Ah will.

More than anything else, I think, Maddie went to war on behalf of the Holy Island seals.

Se parece a enamorarse, saber que acabas de encontrar a tu mejor amiga.

Las personas somos complicadas. Hay mucho más en nuestro interior de lo que se percibe a simple vista.

Queenie, herself again, took hold of Maddie’s hand and squeezed it tightly. She walked all the way back across the airfield without letting it go. Maddie closed her eyes and flew again in the ethereal pale green light. She knew she would never let it go.

But more often than not the missing face has been sucked into the engines of the Nazi death machine, like an unlucky lapwing hitting the propeller of a Lancaster bomber-nothing left but feathers blowing away in the aircraft's wake, as if those warm wings and beating heart had never existed.

Kiss me, Hardy

Queenie was devoted to careless name-dropping, scattering the details of her privileged upbringing without the faintest hint of modesty or embarrassment (though, after a while Maddie began to realize she only did it with people she liked or people she detested--those who didn't mind and those she didn't care about--anyone in between, or who might have been offended, she was more cautious with).

A woman did that.

It is incredible what you do, knowing you have to.

I am quite Pan-like in my naïve confidence that he will play by the rules and keep his word.

It’s like being in love, discovering your best friend.

(I really would like to catapult myself back there in time and kick my own teeth in.)

How does she do it? She makes it sound like she is so cut up to be giving them this information, and it's all just bumph out of her head. She never told them ANYTHING. I don't think she's given them the right name of any airfield in Britain except Mainsend and Buscot, which of course were where she was stationed. They could have easily checked. It's all so close to truth, and so glib--her aircraft identification is rather good considering what a fuss she makes about it. It makes me think of the first day I met her, giving those directions in German. So cool and crisp, such authority--suddenly she really was a radio operator, a German radio operator, she was so good at faking it. Or when I told her to be Jamie, how she just suddenly turned into Jamie. This confession of hers is rotten with error...

It makes you very uncomfortable to realize that your emotional attachment to something is an indulgence.

But a part of me lies buried in lace and roses on a riverbank in France—a part of me is broken off forever. A part of me will always be unflyable, stuck in the climb.

When you’re flying, the changing balance of lift and weight pulls you up or down. But another pair of forces pulls you forward or backward through the air: thrust and drag. Thrust is the power that pulls the kite forward—you run with it to get it up in the air. You have to have thrust to create lift. Drag is there because your kite’s surfaces push against the air and slow the kite down. Drag doesn’t pull you out of the sky; it makes you fly more slowly.

I had been in France less than 48 hours before that obliging agent of yours had to stop me being run over by a French van full of French chickens because I’d looked the wrong way before crossing the street. Which shows how cunning the Gestapo are. “This person I’ve pulled from beneath the wheels of certain death was expecting traffic to travel on the left side of the road. Therefore she must be British, and is likely to have parachuted into Nazi-occupied France out of an Allied plane. I shall now arrest her as a spy.

She tried not to think about what it would be like running across the airfield to the radio room an hour from now, under fire. But she did it. Because you do. It is incredible what you do, knowing you have to.

...it never occurred to him that now he was looking at his master, at the one person in all the world who held his fate right between her palms-- me, in patched hand-me-downs and untrimmed hair and idiot smile-- and that my hatred for him is pure and black and unforgiving.

I am no longer afraid of getting old. Indeed I can’t believe I ever said anything so stupid. So childish. So offensive and arrogant. But mainly, so very, very stupid. I desperately want to grow old.

With her words in my mind while I'm reading, she is as real as I am. Gloriously daft, drop-dead charming, full of bookish nonsense and foul language, brave and generous. She's right here. Afraid and exhausted, alone, but fighting.

I of course took the opportunity to interpose wi’ pig-headed Wallace pride, ‘I am not English, you ignorant Jerry bastard, I am a SCOT.

Don’t you think it makes them stronger when you give them someone to despise?

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

The soaring mountains rose around her, and the poets’ waters glittered beneath her in the valleys of memory—hosts of golden daffodils, Swallows and Amazons, Peter Rabbit. She

She was never so petty. She did not dabble with minnows at the surface when there were thirty-pound salmon swimming deeper down.

And this, even more wonderful and mysterious, is also true: when I read it, when I read what Julie's written, she is instantly alive again, whole and undamaged. With her words in my mind while I'm reading, she is as real as I am. Gloriously daft, drop-dead charming, full of bookish nonsense and foul language, brave and generous. She's right here. Afraid and exhausted, alone, but fighting. Flying in silver moonlight in a plane that can't be landed, stuck in the climb - alive, alive, ALIVE.

Each force in flight is balanced by an opposing force. The opposite of lift is weight. Weight is always trying to pull an object back to earth, so to get something to stay up, lift has to be greater than weight. You’d think your weight would always be the same, but it isn’t. When you do aerobatics or go into a dive—like a kite that’s plunging into the sand at the beach—there’s an increase in gravity, and that makes you weigh more. If you want your heavy kite to stay in the air, you have to increase the lift, as well. Maybe by waiting for a stronger wind. Maybe by finding a windier place to fly your kite. Maddie brought lift back into my life by forcing me outside. So did Bob, who introduced me to the editors of this magazine. So did Fernande, the chambermaid at the Paris Ritz, who gave me her daughter’s clothes and made me get dressed and brought me coffee every morning for three weeks.

What’s strange about the whole thing is that although it’s riddled with nonsense, altogether it’s true – Julie’s told our story, mine and hers, our friendship, so truthfully. It is us. And this, even more wonderful and mysterious, is also true: when I read it, when I read what Julie’s written, she is instantly alive again, whole and undamaged. With her words in my mind while I’m reading, she is as real as I am. Gloriously daft, drop-dead charming, full of bookish nonsense and foul language, brave and generous. She’s right here. Afraid and exhausted, alone, but fighting. Flying in silver moonlight in a plane that can’t be landed, stuck in the climb – alive, alive, ALIVE.

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

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

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

Truth is the daughter of time, not authority.’” And:

There’s glory and honor in being chosen. But not much room for free will.

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.

I am scared of the way they are clinging to the French and Belgian ports, even though they’ve been pushed out of most of the rest of France. There is something about it that spooks me. They’ve lost.

Did I call them Laurel and Hardy? I meant sodding Romeo and Juliet. This is flirting, á la Gestapo underlings: She: Oh, you are so strong and manly, M'sieur Thibaut. These knots you tie are so secure. He: That is nothing. Look, I pull them so tight you cannot undo them. Try. She: It is true, I cannot! Oh, pull them tighter! He: Chérie, your wish is my command. It is my ankles, not hers, which he is binding so tightly and with such masculine charm. She: I shall have to call you in tomorrow morning as well, to do this task for me. He: You must cross the cords, so, and knot them behind - Me: Squeak! Squeak! She: Shut up and write, ya wee skrikin' Scots piece o' shite. Well, no, she did not use those exact words. But you get the idea.

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.

I have spent a vexing half-hour scrapping with Fräulein Engel over the pen nib, which I swear I did not bend on purpose the first time. It is true that it spared me having to continue for a good long while but it did not move things along for that harpy to straighten it out against my teeth when I could have easily done it myself against the table. It is also true that it was stupid of me to bend it out of shape again, on purpose, the second she handed it back to me. Then she had to show me SEVERAL TIMES how, when she was at school, the nurse would use a pen nib to make a pinprick for a blood test. I don’t know why I bent the stupid thing again. It is so easy to wind Miss Engel up. She always wins; but only because my ankles are tied to my chair. Well, and also because at the end of every argument she reminds me of the deal I made with a certain officer of the Gestapo, and I collapse.

There’s no efficient way to kill yourself with a dressmaker’s pin (I wouldn’t call contracting gangrene an efficient way to kill yourself) – I puzzled over it for a long time, seeing as they’d left the pins there, but it’s just not possible. Useful for picking locks though. I so loved the burglary lessons we got when we were training. Didn’t so much enjoy the bleak aftermath of my unsuccessful attempt to put them to use – very good at picking locks but not so good at getting out of the building. Our prison cells are only hotel bedrooms, but we are guarded like royalty. And also, there are dogs. After that episode with the pins, they had a good go at making sure I wouldn’t be able to walk if I did manage to get out – don’t know where you pick up the skills for disabling a person without actually breaking her legs, Nazi School of Assault and Battery? Like everything else it wasn’t permanent damage, nothing left this week but the bruises, and they check me carefully now for stray bits of metal. I got caught yesterday trying to hide a pen nib in my hair (I didn’t have a plan for it, but you never know). Oh – often I forget I am not writing this for myself, and then it’s too late to scratch it out. The evil Engel always snatches everything away from me and raises an alarm if she sees me trying to retract anything. Yesterday I tried ripping off the bottom of the page and eating it, but she got to it first. (It was when I realised I had thoughtlessly mentioned the factory at Swinley. It is refreshing sometimes to fight with her. She has the advantage of freedom, but I am a lot more imaginative. Also I am willing to use my teeth which she is squeamish about.) Where was I? Hauptsturmführer von Linden has taken away everything I wrote yesterday. It is your own fault, you cold and soulless Jerry bastard, if I repeat myself.