The Rose Code Quotes

“If he doesn’t love me in a boiler suit, he’s not worth dressing up for in the first place.”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“Are not there little chapters in everybody’s life, Beth had read in Vanity Fair only that morning, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of history?”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“Why and if. The two most painful words in existence”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“Every night, tell yourself what you told me. How you’re a patriot, not a traitor. How you’re the hero of this story, not the villain.” Beth smiled. “Then remember that you got an innocent woman locked in a madhouse to save your own skin, and ask yourself: how goddamned heroic is that?”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“How much she hated being a woman sometimes: underpaid and underestimated and betrayed by your own body.”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“Osla Kendall is lightly fictionalized from the real-life Osla Benning, a beautiful, effervescent, Canadian-born heiress and Hut 4 translator who was Prince Philip’s long-term wartime girlfriend”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“We loved each other by proxy, Mr. Graham. He loved me through a girl he saw once in Paris in 1918, and I loved him through his letters, but we hardly spent any time together. I don’t have any personal anecdotes about my husband. We didn’t have time to create any.”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“No one should tell their mother more than one-third of anything they get up to.”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“She wanted to go home, and she had no idea where to find it.”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“Mab didn’t know what to make of such letters. How could a man who talked like his vocabulary was as rationed as his meat be so verbose in print? Not just verbose, but funny, wry, moody, tender . . . yet she wasn’t sure she understood him any better. Nothing he wrote ever touched on himself, but an envelope still winged from London nearly every other day. What was she supposed to write back? That the new billet was very nice, that the new landlady was very nice, that the weather was very nice? She couldn’t say anything about her work and didn’t have her husband’s knack for spinning pages about daily trifles. Trying to carry on a conversation with Francis seemed destined to be one-sided—but whereas he was the silent one in person, by letter, she felt like the mute.”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“She had flirted all her life, instinctively, defensively. You play that same game, she thought, looking at Philip. Be charming to all, so no one gets too close.”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“These have knelled your fall and ruin, but your ears were far away,’” Beth quoted one of Dilly’s irreverent verses. “‘English lassies rustling papers through the sodden Bletchley day .”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“She’d learned something these last few days about dealing with cryptanalysts: point them at the coffee, point them at the problem, then get out of the way.”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“She knew something else as well. If she put enough steps in line, one after the other, she would get there—to the ticket booth, to Bletchley, to the rest of her life—without crumbling into pieces. In the grand scheme of things, losing Philip wasn’t remotely important. Not in a world where there were invasions of Europe being planned, where millions around the globe were dying. It didn’t matter at all that she felt like she was being torn apart inside by white-hot pincers.”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“An oasis in the desert, surely, for a boy raised without a home. A boy who’d grown into an ambitious man . . . Osla knew Philip so well; of course he was ambitious. What man in his lonely, barebones position would turn down such a chance—status, wealth, power, allied to a loving family and a girl he thought he might very well be able to love?”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“Mab felt a grin hook itself nearly behind her ears.”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“Darling Mab, you are and always will be the Girl in the Hat. The girl who makes life worth living.”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“Better to live an old maid with a shiny desk and a salary in the bank, proudly achieved through the sweat of her own efforts, than end up disappointed and old before her time thanks to long factory hours and too much childbirth. Anything was better than that.”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“Noone should tell their mother more than one third what they get up to.”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“..."Wouldn't you rather be off with some fellow who can take you to meet his parents, give you a ring someday?" "No." Mab seemed to love being married, and clearly Osla wanted to be, but Beth didn't feel that tug. She'd just got out of a household that felt like a prison; the thought of starting things up with a man who might trap her in another household someday made her want to scratch and howl.”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“Such a light kiss, to leave her so pinned in place.”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“Dilly Knox was one of the Park’s eccentric geniuses, notorious for his absentmindedness, his Alice-in-Wonderland approach to codebreaking, and his habit of recruiting only women for his team.”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“Day shifts weren’t so bad; you could step outside for a welcome jolt of sunshine and suck your soul back into your lungs.”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“What I’m saying is, I don’t need a lot of young cockerels chesting about, competing with each other. Women”—Dilly leveled a finger at Beth—“are more flexible, less competitive, and more inclined to get on with the job in hand. They pay more attention to detail, probably because they’ve been squinting at their knitting and measuring things in kitchens all their lives. They listen.”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“But something else went on at the same time war did, and that was life. It kept right on going up until the moment it stopped...”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“Bit of a sore point with me.” He made himself shrug. “My—my mother went mad.” Alice of Battenberg, from one of the German noble houses. “You’ve hardly ever mentioned her.” “She had a breakdown when I was eight or nine. So many doctors—they couldn’t decide if she was neurotic or paranoid schizophrenic or . . .”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“That’s the last time you’ll ever call me kitten, you rat bastard.”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“Beth didn’t think God was nearly as severe as her mother made Him out to be.”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“Educated London men liked girls who could talk about the use of metaphor and simile—you just had to be slightly less knowledgeable than they were.”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code

“When a girl has broken national security to ease your mind about your family’s lying in the path of an invasion route, she has officially become a friend.”
― Kate Quinn, The Rose Code