An Unfinished Life Quotes

“War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”
― Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963

“She was a little removed,” Jack said as an adult. In private, he complained that Rose never told him that she loved him. Jack’s friend Charles Spalding, who saw the family up close, described Rose as “so cold, so distant from the whole thing . . . I doubt if she ever rumpled the kid’s hair in his whole life. . . . It just didn’t exist: the business of letting your son know you’re close, that she’s there. She wasn’t.” Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy told the journalist Theodore White that “history made him [Jack] what he was . . . this lonely sick boy. His mother really didn’t love him. . . . She likes to go around talking about being the daughter of the Mayor of Boston, or how she was an ambassador’s wife. . . . She didn’t love him. . . . History made him what he was.”
― Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963

“Whether it is the astronaut exploring the boundaries of space, or the overworked civil servant laboring into the night to keep a Government program going, the effectiveness and creativity of the individual must rest, in large measure, on his physical fitness and vitality.”
― Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963

“La juventud no es una etapa de la vida, sino un estado de ánimo [...] el predominio del valor sobre la timidez, del apetito por la aventura sobre el amor a la comodidad.”
― Robert Dallek, J.F. Kennedy: Una vida inacabada (PENINSULA)

“a gentleman of thirty-two who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, and play the violin.”
― Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963