The Alice Network Quotes

“What did it matter if something scared you, when it simply had to be done?”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“Hope was such a painful thing, far more painful than rage.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“There are two kinds of flowers when it comes to women,” Eve said. “The kind that sit safe in a beautiful vase, or the kind that survive in any conditions . . . even in evil. Lili was the latter. Which are you?”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“Poetry is like passion--it should not be merely pretty; it should overwhelm and bruise.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“Fleurs du mal,” Eve heard herself saying, and shivered. “What?” “Baudelaire. We are not flowers to be plucked and shielded, Captain. We are flowers who flourish in evil.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“So you're met Finn. He's a dash, isn't he? If I weren't older than dirt and ugly as sin, I'd climb that like a French alp.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“Steel blades such as you and I do not measure against the standards for ordinary women”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“I will not tell you one single solitary fact about my work, my friends, or the woman I was arrested with. But I will tell you this, Rene Bordelon. You're a gullible fool. You're a terrible lover. And I hate Baudelaire.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“...but nightmares were easier to bear when there were warm arms in the dark to burrow into.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“...You know why none of us judge?' I bumped his shoulder with mine until he finally looked down at me. 'Because none of us have the goddamn right to look down our noses at anyone else's sins.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“Boys got to do whatever they wanted, and girls got to sit around looking pretty.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“The idea made her sick and scared, but so what? Why did it matter if something scared you, when it simply had to be done anyway?”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“Life ought to be more like a play; the entrances and exits would be a lot cleaner.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“It is facile to condemn the French for giving in to the Nazis too easily when many French citizens would have still borne the horrendous scars of the first occupation, would have clearly remembered having to stand back while German sentries robbed them of everything but the nearly inedible ration bread because the only alternative was to be arrested, beaten, or shot. The French survived not one but two brutal occupations in a span of less than forty years, and deserve more credit for their flinty endurance than they receive.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“Many a gem lies hidden in darkness and oblivion”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“How do I know what I'm up for if you won't tell me what this is about?'
'It's about a friend,' she said simply. 'A blond woman with a sunshine laugh and the courage to light the world on fire.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“I'd often wished I could work out people as easily as I did arithmetic: simply break them down to their common denominators and solve.
Numbers didn't' lie; there was always an answer, and the answer was either right or it was wrong. Simple. But nothing in life was simple, and there was no answer to solve for.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“What I mean is, it's not a matter of age. There are boys aged fifty, and men aged fifteen. It's all in what they do, not how old they are...A boy messes up with a lass, and he slinks off without fixing anything. A man makes a mistake, he fixes it. He apologizes.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“That doesn’t mean you were boring, ma p’tite. Just bored. 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.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“Or was it not change, but becoming what she already was?”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“What’s broken does not have to stay that way.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“I believe in revenge... I’ve lost faith in much over the years, but not that.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“The habit of nagging, let me assure you, goes with a nurse no matter what she does.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“Face like a potato, temper like a prison wardress.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“He’d turn his own mother in to the Germans for a profit, not that he has a mother. The devil probably shit him out after a night’s drinking with Judas.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“Clearly, women in active fighting zones unsettled their contemporaries, but they still left a legacy behind. Girls of the ’30s and ’40s joined the SOE to train as spies against the Nazis because they had been inspired by books and stories about women like Louise de Bettignies—and they weren’t inspired by her feminine graces. They were inspired by her courage, her toughness, and her unflinching drive, just as I imagined Charlie being inspired by Eve’s. Such women were fleurs du mal indeed—with steel, with endurance, and with flair, they thrived in evil and inspired others in doing so.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“putting these things on paper meant you had to unpack your own disgrace in ugly black and white.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“Life is not a math problem, Charlotte.” If it was, I’d have been a lot better at it. I’d often wished I could work out people as easily as I did arithmetic: simply break them down to their common denominators and solve. Numbers didn’t lie; there was always an answer, and the answer was either right or it was wrong. Simple. But nothing in life was simple, and there was no answer here to solve for.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“Facing a pistol-wielding murderer does tend to put parents further down the list of things to be intimidated by.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“You think there are no idiots in the intelligence business, that your superiors are all brilliant men who understand the game? [...] This business is rife with idiots. They play with lives and they play badly, and when people like you die as a result, they shrug and as 'Risks have to be taken in wartime.' You'd really march yourself into a firing squad for that kind of fool?”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network