Jane Thynne > Quotes

“It was about a year ago when I first made contact with members of the British Foreign Office. I volunteered my services and privileged information to a foreign power. Which is effectively treason, or would be, except that I regard it as pure patriotism. You see, Clara, I no longer recognize the Germany I love. I see these brutes strong-arming a small nation like Austria, and now threatening Czechoslovakia, because they can and because no one will stop them. I see them running riot with the rule of law - Germany, whose legal system is the greatest in the world, which has always stood for justice and right. And when I see this gang of thugs flooding the streets of my beloved country with tides of blood, I feel hatred swelling inside me. Damn Himmler and Heydrich and all the other sadists. I hate this false Germany, as much as I love the real Germany. And I intend to do something about it.”
― Jane Thynne, The Scent of Secrets

“Even the famously unsporty Hitler liked to carry a riding whip in his hand.”
― Jane Thynne, The Pursuit of Pearls

“As she sucked on her cherry bonbon, her tongue found the ridge of the swastika on the fruitdrop's sugar coat, the sourness beneath the sweet, and the image of grandmother came to her, with her gentle eyes and her bagful of Gummi bears and marzipan pigs.”
― Jane Thynne, Black Roses

“All the dangerous glamour had been swept up by the broom of National Socialism,”
― Jane Thynne, The Pursuit of Pearls

“She had never felt so alone or frightened in her life. She had come to Berlin to feel closer to her mother, and had found instead danger and death.”
― Jane Thynne, Black Roses

“passing bars belching beer breath through open doors”
― Jane Thynne, The Pursuit of Pearls

“She had the sudden vivid realization that each choice, each split-second decision she had made until that moment, was what had made her life. She had shaped her life daily, the way a painter chooses pigments and lays down one brushstroke after another on the canvas. Whether she would die here, at the hands of the Russians, or be cut down in a senseless attempt to escape, she was comforted. She had, at least, been the artist of her own existence.”
― Jane Thynne, The Words I Never Wrote

“She pictured the diaphanous wings of flies glittering like cut coal in the air above her friend’s body.”
― Jane Thynne, The Pursuit of Pearls

“The past was a foreign country you revisited at your peril.”
― Jane Thynne, A War of Flowers

“Führer Kontakt it was called, an intense magnetic hold that made the person with him believe, just for that moment, that he or she was the only one in the room. A hypnotic force that dazzled, empowered, and enslaved.”
― Jane Thynne, The Pursuit of Pearls

“It's incredible how enormous actions can turn on the whim of a single man.”
― Jane Thynne, The Scent of Secrets

“SHE WALKED DOWN THE great stuccoed apartment blocks of the Kurfürstendamm, now decorated with antiaircraft guns pointing into the porcelain-blue sky.”
― Jane Thynne, The Pursuit of Pearls

“She could feel the emotion in the place pressing up against the walls, all eyes alert, hearts beating as one, the sense that everyone there was part of something bigger than themselves. That was a powerful emotion. It was the emotion that the Third Reich relied on. It was the kind of emotion that could move mountains.”
― Jane Thynne, The Pursuit of Pearls

“Anyone of their age had already spent years in the Hitler Youth being trained to ridicule, taunt, and bully,”
― Jane Thynne, The Pursuit of Pearls

“Perhaps, he thought, there was some strange satisfaction to be derived from confining savage animals here, given that the savagery outside this place was the kind that couldn't be confined.”
― Jane Thynne, Black Roses