Elizabeth Pewsey > Quotes

“he saw the grim grey buildings going up and wondered again why socialism so often equalled hideous.”
― Elizabeth Pewsey, Fencing With Death

“The road surface seemed to have been repaired with splats of hardened porridge,”
― Elizabeth Pewsey, Fencing With Death

“Julius was engrossed in the copy of Le Monde he had bought at the station. He found the complex tangle of French politics under the Fourth Republic soothing after days spent unravelling the riddle of Philippe d’Icère’s identity.”
― Elizabeth Pewsey, Finding Philippe: Lost in France...

“The other customers looked grey and unwashed and downtrodden. And hungry. Everyone in the country, from Land’s End to John O’Groats, was hungry and grubby.”
― Elizabeth Pewsey, Finding Philippe: Lost in France...

“Vicky sniffed the air. It was chilly and damp after the brilliant spring warmth of the south, and a thin fog hung in the air, But, even so, this wasn’t the chill dampness of her native city. Essence of Paris was not at all the same as essence of London. The very smell of the air was different. Probably drains, and unsavoury smells from the Seine,”
― Elizabeth Pewsey, Finding Philippe: Lost in France...

“The French are all terrified of their wives and mothers, same as the rest of us,”
― Elizabeth Pewsey, Finding Philippe: Lost in France...

“he counts all Americans as foreigners and not out of the top drawer, but this man was so rich he was beyond drawers.”
― Elizabeth Pewsey, Finding Philippe: Lost in France...

“sarky,”
― Elizabeth Pewsey, Finding Philippe: Lost in France...

“She’s looking for love, your aunt.’ Olivia was startled. ‘Do you know, I think she is? Wouldn’t you, if you had a tyrannical father and a browbeaten mother and a pompous brother and six older sisters? Wouldn’t you be simply longing to have one person to love and be loved by?”
― Elizabeth Pewsey, Finding Philippe: Lost in France...

“London, by contrast, was uniformly grey, and soaked with a thin drizzle which seemed to have gone on without pause for days. Londoners looked depressed, their infants and dogs being taken for wet walks in the parks looked depressed, the pigeons looked depressed. Only the ducks went serenely and contentedly about their watery business.”
― Elizabeth Pewsey, Fencing With Death

“the whole of Budapest seems to be lit by a twenty-watt light bulb.”
― Elizabeth Pewsey, Fencing With Death

“It was all rather trying dealing with my aunt’s lawyers in Nice, and this is much more complicated. I’m afraid of missing nuances.’ ‘You think there may be nuances.’ ‘Where there are lawyers, there are nuances.”
― Elizabeth Pewsey, Finding Philippe: Lost in France...

“must say, we didn’t have such strange girls as you seem to know when I was at school.”
― Elizabeth Pewsey, Finding Philippe: Lost in France...

“How had she managed to live for twenty-five years without accepting that life wasn’t like that? Even when the truth stared her in the face, she wouldn’t recognise it, because truth was inevitably muddy and partial.”
― Elizabeth Pewsey, Finding Philippe: Lost in France...

“He had too many friends, had heard of too many people, who had been unable to adapt to work in peacetime offices. Danger and cutting corners and finding incredible solutions to impossible problems didn’t equip men for a life rising steadily through the ranks to become Chief this or Head of that for a few years before they had to retire.”
― Elizabeth Pewsey, Finding Philippe: Lost in France...

“all he cared about was what would happen after the war. He longs for France to become a communist country. It’s not an uncommon view.”
― Elizabeth Pewsey, Finding Philippe: Lost in France...