She picked up the stout and took a sip. It slid down her throat like silk.

Jack had been the love of her life and he was gone. It seemed now that there had never been bad times, though she knew that wasn’t true.

Vesta was so good with paperwork – you could hand her a file of drab, seemingly dull information and she’d construct a story from it worthy of a novel.

Didn’t young people care what the generation before them had achieved? And if not, why had everyone gone through those grim difficult wartime years?

It was nearly ten years since the peace though her memories of the war still felt fresh.

Covert operations relied on the unguarded slip, the unconscious choosing of one word over another.

The good thing about the aristocracy – German or English – was that they were easily traced, Mirabelle thought.

This investigation felt difficult, like driving in fog.

Mirabelle was always an enigma, and he had the sense that if he pushed her, she’d bolt.

Food in wartime Britain, she had to admit, was hardly inspiring.

A chap’s impending death has a way of focusing the mind.

I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.

No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarrass us...a difficult moment when you are out of practice - a moment that makes you go cold, cold and wary.

The species greatest harvest ― words.

Gratitude brings more blessings into our lives.

Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.

The end we ought to propose to ourselves is to become, in this life, the most perfect worshipers of God we can possibly be, as we hope to be through all eternity.

As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.

I never think that being a woman is so hard. Maybe don't think about your gender and be confident as you go forward rather than try to single yourself out as some underserved part of filmmaking.

The past is like a handful of dust. It filters through your fingers, disappearing little by little. I wish, for one day, I could go back. In another life I would do things differently.

Honour sits smiling at the sale of truth.