Code Name Verity (Code Name Verity, #1)

by Elizabeth Wein

People are complicated. There is so much more to everybody than you realize. You see someone in school every day, or at work, in the canteen, and you share a cigarette or 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 thirteen, or what you imagine yourself doing with the pilot who looks like Leslie Howard if you were alone in his bunk after a dance.

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

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

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.

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

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.