The Girl with the Red Balloon Quotes

“People never mentioned in history books still made history.”
― Katherine Locke, The Girl with the Red Balloon

“Most of the things we think are selfish aren’t at all. We’re just so conditioned to think that wanting things is wrong.”
― Katherine Locke, The Girl with the Red Balloon

“I read once, and I wished I could remember where, that Brave was a place. You could just go there if you wanted. There were dozens of Braves, everywhere, all over the world, where ordinary people stood up to tyranny and oppression.”
― Katherine Locke, The Girl with the Red Balloon

“The Holocaust happened not because of one person, but because of many people believing in an ideology promoted by a charismatic man at the right time and place, and millions of people colluding. History is not singular. Events do not happen in a vacuum.”
― Katherine Locke, The Girl with the Red Balloon

“History and time are impossible knots. We’ll never understand every moment that makes the next moment more likely.”
― Katherine Locke, The Girl with the Red Balloon

“History is riddled with deaths. We’re all here because of ghosts.”
― Katherine Locke, The Girl with the Red Balloon

“She was on the other side of the fence. Simple borders and demarcations made such a difference in someone’s future, hopes, and dreams, and the promises they could make. How pointless the world could be.”
― Katherine Locke, The Girl with the Red Balloon

“And thank you, reader, for picking up this book. For following Ellie into this world. For feeling so deeply like Benno. For fighting alongside Kai. For believing in the goodness of people like Mitzi. Be brave. Be a sponge. And remember, you too are making history each day. Let’s make a history that lifts up all people, erases no one, and leaves behind nothing but hateful ideology.”
― Katherine Locke, The Girl with the Red Balloon

“What oppression like this did was inhibit personal, individual connections. Personal connections created a community, and community wasn’t the opposite of individualism. We were collectively a whole made of millions and millions of moving parts, each of us our own gear interlocking with another gear and turning the world a little farther in the right direction.”
― Katherine Locke, The Girl with the Red Balloon

“What could change if we started to measure society’s successes not in wars won but in moments in which we countered injustice?”
― Katherine Locke, The Girl with the Red Balloon

“You cannot erase a wrong. You can only make it right in the present and the future.”
― Katherine Locke, The Girl with the Red Balloon

“You can’t change that because of your conscience. We can’t change the past, Aurora. We can only try to do better in the present and the future.”
― Katherine Locke, The Girl with the Red Balloon

“When would people learn that no leader of any state, free or Communist, gave a shit about us people? We were all out here, flotsam and jetsam, floundering. We only had each other. That’s all.”
― Katherine Locke, The Girl with the Red Balloon

“All the facts in history books couldn’t prepare someone for standing in a place where history was present tense.”
― Katherine Locke, The Girl with the Red Balloon

“What could change if we started to measure society’s successes not in wars won but in moments in which we countered injustice? When good did win out over evil.”
― Katherine Locke, The Girl with the Red Balloon