The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

The hangover of war was still visible here in a way you didn’t see in New York.

England saw a lot more war.

Hope was such a painful thing, far more painful than rage.

her pure French and her pure English. Native of both countries, at home in neither.

She lied and evaded as easily as she breathed; it was what she’d had to do all her life. Lying, lying, lying, with a face like a daisy.

No one lets girls do anything at all. Not spend our own money, sell our own things, or plan our own lives.

😠😠

Time stretched on forever when you spent it vomiting.

Great start to a chapter

“Yes, just like everybody else. But only after the danger is done—before that, fear is an indulgence.” She slid her hand through Eve’s elbow. “Welcome to the Alice Network.”

Title

Rose wasn’t going to write a book or swim the Channel or do anything different—because once you’re pregnant, you’re finished.

Most women are bored, because being female is boring. We only get married because it’s something to do, and then we have children and find out babies are the only thing more boring than other women.”

Why on earth did it matter if something scared you, when it simply had to be done anyway? Why were so many women such timid ninnies?

there is nothing more potent than forgetfulness.

And really, in the life she led was there anything else besides now?

There was the past and the now. Nothing else was certain. Nothing else was real.

Like now feels

she caught René’s lower lip with her teeth and bit deep. She tasted the coppery tang of his blood, bitter as her own failure. Sawed her teeth harder and harder, even as he shouted and began wrenching at her hair. It was the last, savage kiss between source and spy, captor and captive, collaborator and betrayer,

“Never mind,” Lili whispered. “We shall have a good look at it over our shoulders, the day we’re released.”

The Germans didn’t need to waste bullets killing their female prisoners when neglect and disease could do it for them.

Who knew bickering could be so enjoyable?

I shall come back to your bedroom and silently glide toward you with the shadows of the night . . . I shall give you kisses frigid as the moon and the caresses of a serpent that slithers around a grave.’”

“My f-favorite poem, ‘Le Revenant,’ ‘The Ghost,’ but it sounds better in French. Revenant comes from the verb revenir.”

It’s this flowery air in Grasse; it’s like the elixir of youth.” As we strolled through the oldest part of the city, where the buildings arched overhead, leaning on each other like friendly shoulders,

I realized I loved Grasse.

I want to visit.

The spiderous fingers, the even voice, the cheap soul

of a torturer peeping out from behind the expensive suit of a sophisticate, that was all the same.

That hadn’t been a man sitting across the table from me. It had been a human viper.

Facing a pistol-wielding murderer does tend to put parents further down the list of things to be intimidated by.