jordan

“If she’d wanted out of her own country, she could have applied to come here legally—” someone else began. “How?” The word broke from Grace and Reka simultaneously. Reka was the one who continued, “How could she have come here legally? The USSR wouldn’t have let her go. Even if they had, would this country have taken her? I had trouble getting accepted here legally, and I had a sponsor in the Senate and was fleeing Hitler.”
― Kate Quinn, The Briar Club

“Because the biggest difference between Americans and Soviets, she’d realized her first month in this country, didn’t lie in the vowels, the clothes, or how you sweetened your tea. It was in the shoulders. When Soviets were squashed down by life, by luck, by the system, they got resigned—the shoulders drooped. Hit an American with an equal dose of the same oppression and they went stiff—either with anger or with fear, but their shoulders and chin went up, not down.”
― Kate Quinn, The Briar Club

“Happiness.” Grace rose, smoothing her skirt. “It’s a choice as much as anything. Or you could choose to be angry, and if you stay angry long enough, it will become comfortable, like an old robe. But eventually you’ll realize that old robe is all you’ve got, and there isn’t anything else in the wardrobe that fits. And at that point, you’re just waiting to trade the robe for a shroud—or at least, that’s what I’ve always thought.”
― Kate Quinn, The Briar Club

“But that wasn’t the answer people wanted when they gushed How on earth do you do it? They wanted the answer to be simple, for a woman to flip her (fluffy, perfectly starched) skirts and smooth her (fluffy, perfectly curled) hair, and say, Oh, it was nothing!”
― Kate Quinn, The Briar Club