A Woman of No Importance Quotes

“Valor rarely reaps the dividends it should.”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls. —Robert F. Kennedy”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“She gambled again and again with her own life, not out of a fervent nationalism for her own country, but out of love and respect for the freedoms of another.”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“Resistance called for a lonely courage, for men and women who could fight on their own. But the solitude was an eternal strain”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“In what became known as the decade of lies, truth and trust were falling victim to fear, racism, and hatred. Virginia found herself in a ringside seat as the increasingly fragile ideal of democracy failed to find champions with alternative answers”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“As Baker Street knew all too well, Virginia harbored a rebellious streak and a forceful belief in her own abilities. "She did not submit easily to discipline," as [Colonel Maurice] Buckmaster once put it, and "had the habit of making up her own mind without regard to others' point of view.”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“The same false messages were pressed home again and again until they were almost universally believed, even when flying in the face of incontrovertible facts.”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“Four thousand miles away in France, the old boys from the Haute-Loire Resistance wrote to each other to share the devastating news. They had enjoyed nearly forty years of freedom since spending a mere couple of months in Virginia’s presence in 1944. But the warrior they called La Madone had shown them hope, comradeship, courage, and the way to be the best version of themselves, and they had never forgotten. In the midst of hardship and fear, she had shared with them a fleeting but glorious state of happiness and the most vivid moment of their lives. The last of those famous Diane Irregulars—the ever-boyish Gabriel Eyraud, her chouchou—passed away in 2017 while I was researching Virginia’s story. Until the end of his days, he and the others who had known Virginia on the plateau liked to pause now and then to think of the woman in khaki who never, ever gave up on freedom. When they talked with awe and affection of her incredible exploits, they smiled and looked up at the wide, open skies with “les étoiles dans les yeux.”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“I said to myself ‘what the hell,’” she reported “and started to get on with it in my part of the country.”15 Fortunately, such insubordination was tolerated, even encouraged, by Wild Bill Donovan, who liked to say, “I’d rather have a young lieutenant with guts enough to disobey an order than a colonel too regimented to think and act for himself.”16 But it was an unusual move for a woman.”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“Meanwhile, the Gestapo’s most notorious investigator—who would within a year be awarded the Iron Cross (reputedly by Hitler himself) for torturing and slaughtering thousands of résistants—was also taking a personal interest in Virginia. Hauptsturmführer Klaus Barbie, reared by an abusive father who had been severely mentally and physically damaged in fighting the French at Verdun in 1916, was not yet based full-time in Lyon. But he was already consumed by an obsessive desire to crush SOE, seen by the Germans as the backbone of the whole underground threat. Dozens of Gestapo officers were intercepting suspect signals coming out of Lyon and conducting waves of arrests and constant day and night raids from a plushly carpeted suite of offices on the third floor of the cavernous Hôtel Terminus next to Perrache station. They knew they were fast moving in on the center of the terrorist cell. Someone would break down under torture; Barbie would make sure of it. The Limping Lady of Lyon was becoming the Nazis’ most wanted Allied agent in the whole of France.”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“Government lawyers advised that women were particularly vulnerable if caught, as they were not recognized as combatants and therefore not protected by international laws on war.”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“Females were now vassals who could not vote, were legally bound to obey their husbands, and, declared Vichy, “had their nerves upset by strident noises.”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“Three other officers had turned up a few nights previously, one dropping down from an RAF plane apparently in a kilt1—an unfortunate choice of uniform considering he landed on top of a pine tree.”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“Harivel had orders to travel to Lyon to act as Virginia’s wireless operator. He and two others were welcomed by a reception committee led by the former Socialist deputy Jean Pierre-Bloch and his wife, Gaby, who hurried to hide the materiel and sweep up the men into a safe house. But one newcomer could not be found. In the confusion, he had been dropped four miles off course—together with most of the supplies”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“On your way, boys,’ she said with a twisted smile. ‘You’re not taking me. I’m a Frenchwoman and I can handle these babies.’ She began to peel off her coat and hat and the brothers realized she was preparing to sacrifice herself so that they could get away. What her friends admiringly called her ‘fiery love and shame for France’ came first and foremost; she positively embodied the courage she felt so many of her countrymen lacked. The brothers pleaded with her to escape while she could, but her face was set in steely determination”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“Fear never abated [...] Fear for oneself; fear of being denounced; fear of being followed without knowing it; fear that it will be ‘them’, when at dawn one hears or thinks one hears a door slam shut or someone coming up the stairs...Fear, finally, of being afraid and of not being able to surmount it”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“It was a view shared by Geoffrey Hallowes after his visits to Le Puy—which Virginia had now taken to referring to as a “seething salad.”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist. —Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“No one in London gave Agent 3844 more than a fifty-fifty chance of surviving even the first few days. For all Virginia’s qualities, dispatching a one-legged thirty-five-year-old desk clerk on a blind mission into wartime France was on paper an almost insane gamble.”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“The prospect of SOE service in the field was undoubtedly terrifying. So many backed out that SOE would later set up a “cooler,” a remote country house in the wilds of Scotland where quitters would be forcibly confined until what knowledge they had gleaned of SOE was of no use. As of July 1941, F Section had just ten people still in training—of whom Virginia was the only woman. And the only one with a disability.”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“The Nazis held a pathological hatred for black people, a comparative rarity in Europe at the time.”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“This was a time of mass unemployment and grinding poverty when only the dictators seizing power across Europe seemed to offer hope. Hitler, until quite recently the butt of complacent laughter by commentators who said he would come to nothing, was now chancellor of Germany and worshipped by millions;”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“But President Roosevelt had plucked one of his old friends out of retirement as his envoy to handle relations with Vichy—precisely because he was (privately) worried that France would in some way help the Axis powers defeat Britain. Despite the public policy of non-intervention, America had already sent food and aid to the French to try to wean them off German support and win their allegiance.”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“American isolationism remained a formidable force and Washington had recognized Pétain’s totalitarian regime despite its evident accommodation with the Nazis.”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“Traditionally, British secret services had drawn from a shallow gene pool of posh boys raised on imperial adventure stories, but this regard for breeding over intellect was scarcely a match for the ruthless barbarism of the Third Reich.”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“Hitler, until quite recently the butt of complacent laughter by commentators who said he would come to nothing, was now chancellor of Germany and worshipped by millions; Virginia’s host country, Italy, was effectively a one-party fascist state under Mussolini, upheld by gangs of Blackshirt thugs known as squadristi; Stalin ruled by murderous diktat in Russia. Such extremism (on the left and right) seemed to be on the march everywhere, on the back of propaganda, sloganeering, and ruthless media manipulation.”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“Hitler, until quite recently the butt of complacent laughter by commentators who said he would come to nothing, was now chancellor of Germany and worshipped by millions;”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“This was a time of mass unemployment and grinding poverty when only the dictators seizing power across Europe seemed to offer hope. Hitler, until quite recently the butt of complacent laughter by commentators who said he would come to nothing, was now chancellor of Germany and worshipped by millions; Virginia’s host country, Italy, was effectively a one-party fascist state under Mussolini, upheld by gangs of Blackshirt thugs known as squadristi; Stalin ruled by murderous diktat in Russia. Such extremism (on the left and right) seemed to be on the march everywhere, on the back of propaganda, sloganeering, and ruthless media manipulation.”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“Virginia nevertheless made an instant impression at work, conducting her duties—coding and decoding telegrams, dealing with the mail, processing diplomatic visas, and dispatching reports back to Washington on the increasingly tense political situation—”
― Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II