Amy Grochowski > Amy's Quotes

“When you go home
Tell them of us, and say
For your tomorrow,
We gave our today.”
― Patrick O'Donnell, Into the Rising Sun: In Their Own Words, World War II's Pacific Veterans Reveal the Heart of Combat

“The Japanese fought to win - it was a savage, brutal, inhumane, exhausting and dirty business. Our commanders knew that if we were to win and survive, we must be trained realistically for it whether we liked it or not. In the post-war years, the U.S. Marine Corps came in for a great deal of undeserved criticism in my opinion, from well-meaning persons who did not comprehend the magnitude of stress and horror that combat can be. The technology that developed the rifle barrel, the machine gun and high explosive shells has turned war into prolonged, subhuman slaughter. Men must be trained realistically if they are to survive it without breaking, mentally and physically.”
― E.B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa

“God, there must be a meaning. Fiercely he was certain that there must be a meaning.
Surely, while we live we are not lost.
Oh Janos, Janos my brother!
Surely we are not lost--while we live.”
― John Hepworth

“Now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! ... How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care ... We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end ... Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to a powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Surely there is no more wretched sight that the human body unloved and uncared for.”
― Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom

“I had no real communication with anyone at the time, so I was totally dependent on God. And he never failed me.”
― Diet Eman, Things We Couldn't Say

“The War Department in Washington briefly weighed more ambitious schemes to relieve the Americans on a large scale before it was too late. But by Christmas of 1941, Washington had already come to regard Bataan as a lost cause. President Roosevelt had decided to concentrate American resources primarily in the European theater rather than attempt to fight an all-out war on two distant fronts. At odds with the emerging master strategy for winning the war, the remote outpost of Bataan lay doomed. By late December, President Roosevelt and War Secretary Henry Stimson had confided to Winston Churchill that they had regrettably written off the Philippines. In a particularly chilly phrase that was later to become famous, Stimson had remarked, 'There are times when men have to die.”
― Hampton Sides, Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission

“These men suffered enough for a hundred lifetimes, and no one in this country should be allowed to forget it.”
― Hampton Sides, Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission

“It is a naive sort of feminism that insists that women prove their ability to do all the things that men do. This is a distortion and a travesty. Men have never sought to prove that they can do all the things women do. Why subject women to purely masculine criteria? Women can and ought to be judged by the criteria of femininity, for it is in their femininity that they participate in the human race. And femininity has its limitations. So has masculinity. That is what we’ve been talking about. To do this is not to do that. To be this is not to be that. To be a woman is not to be a man. To be married is not to be single - which may mean not to have a career. To marry this man is not to marry all the others. A choice is a limitation.”
― Elisabeth Elliot, Let Me Be a Woman

“Flowers spring to blossom where she walks
The careful ways of duty;
Our hard, stiff lines of life with her
Are flowing curves of beauty.
”
― John Greenleaf Whittier

“I believe a woman, in order to be a good wife, must be (among other things) both sensual and maternal.”
― Elisabeth Elliot, Let Me Be a Woman

“Because misogynists are the best of men.” All the poets reacted to these words with hooting. Boccaccio was forced to raise his voice: “Please understand me. Misogynists don’t despise women. Misogynists don’t like femininity. Men have always been divided into two categories. Worshipers of women, otherwise known as poets, and misogynists, or, more accurately, gynophobes. Worshipers or poets revere traditional feminine values such as feelings, the home, motherhood, fertility, sacred flashes of hysteria, and the divine voice of nature within us, while in misogynists or gynophobes these values inspire a touch of terror. Worshipers revere women’s femininity, while misogynists always prefer women to femininity. Don’t forget: a woman can be happy only with a misogynist. No woman has ever been happy with any of you!”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting