Unbroken Quotes

“*2 As Halloran parachuted over Tokyo, the Zero that had shot him down sped toward him, and Halloran was certain that he was going to be strafed, as so many falling airmen were. But instead of firing, the pilot saluted him. After the war, Halloran and that pilot, Isamu Kashiide, became dear friends.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“As he walked over the bridge, Louie glanced back. Some of the guards and camp officials stood in the compound, watching them go. A few of the sickest POWs remained behind, awaiting transport the next day. Fitzgerald stayed with them, unwilling to leave until the last of his men was liberated.*”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“At a Japanese POW camp, this dead American was found near war’s end, still standing, at a sink at which he was trying to drink. American soldiers and guerrillas went behind enemy lines to rescue the men at this camp, but they were too late. They found the bodies of 150 POWs, starved to death.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“We just sat there and watched the plane pass the island, and it never came back,” he said. “I could see it on the radar. It makes you feel terrible. Life was cheap in war.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“The fatal poison of irresponsible power.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

“Louie made a habit of sitting next to the mountainous shot putter Jack Torrance, who had an inexplicably tiny appetite. When Torrance couldn’t finish his entrée, Louie dropped onto the plate like a vulture.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“And for some men, years of swallowed rage, terror, and humiliation concentrated into what Holocaust survivor Jean Améry would call “a seething, purifying thirst for revenge.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Watanabe beat POWs every day, fracturing their windpipes, rupturing their eardrums, shattering their teeth, tearing one man’s ear half off, leaving men unconscious. He made one officer sit in a shack, wearing only a fundoshi undergarment, for four days in winter. He tied a sixty-five-year-old POW to a tree and left him there for days. He ordered one man to report to him to be punched in the face every night for three weeks. He practiced judo on an appendectomy patient. When gripped in the ecstasy of an assault, he wailed and howled, drooling and frothing, sometimes sobbing, tears running down his cheeks. Men came to know when an outburst was imminent: Watanabe’s right eyelid would sag a moment before he snapped.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Sylvia kept writing to Louie, telling him of all they would do when he came home. “Darling, we will take the best of care for you,” she wrote. “You shall be ‘King Toots,’—anything your heart desires—(yes, even red heads and all).”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“the AAF surgeon general suggests that in the Fifteenth Air Force, between November 1, 1943, and May 25, 1945, 70 percent of men listed as killed in action died in operational aircraft accidents, not as a result of enemy action.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“The crash of Green Hornet had left Louie and Phil in the most desperate physical extremity, without food, water, or shelter. But on Kwajalein, the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else had been lost: dignity.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Stories of cannibalism among castaways were so common that British sailors considered the practice of choosing and sacrificing a victim to be an established “custom of the sea.” To well-fed men on land, the idea of cannibalism has always inspired revulsion. To many sailors who have stood on the threshold of death, lost in the agony and mind-altering effects of starvation, it has seemed a reasonable, even inescapable solution.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Every morning, the Omori POWs were assembled and ordered to call out their number in Japanese. After November 1, 1944, the man assigned number twenty-nine would sing out “Niju ku!” at the top of his lungs.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“The next morning, Louie was taken to an airfield to be flown to Okinawa, where many POWs were being collected before being sent home. Seeing a table stacked with K rations, he began cramming the boxes under his shirt, brushing off an attendant who tried to assure him that he didn't have to hoard them, as no one was going to starve him anymore. Looking extremely pregnant, Louie boarded the plane.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

“Then, together, they passed through the camp gate and marched up the road, toward wives and sweethearts and children and Mom and Dad and home.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

“In an instant, the end would come with the most minute of gestures—the flick of the Zero pilot’s finger on his cannon trigger—and Super
Man would carry ten men into the Pacific. Pillsbury could see the pilot who would end his life, the tropical sun illuminating his face, a white scarf coiled about his neck. Pillsbury thought: I have to kill this man. Pillsbury sucked in a sharp breath and fired. He watched the tracers skim away from his gun’s muzzle and punch through the cockpit of the Zero. The windshield blew apart and the pilot pitched forward. The fatal blow never came to Super Man. The Zero pilot, surely seeing the top turret smashed and the waist windows vacant, had probably assumed that the gunners were all dead. He had waited too long.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

“Though all three men faced the same hardship, their differing perceptions of it appeared to be shaping their fates. Louie and Phil’s hope displaced their fear and inspired them to work toward their survival, and each success renewed their physical and emotional vigor. Mac’s resignation seemed to paralyze him, and the less he participated in their efforts to survive, the more he slipped. Though he did the least, as the days passed, it was he who”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“In Sugamo, Louie asked his escort what had happened to the Bird. He was told that it was believed that the former sergeant, hunted, exiled and in despair, had stabbed himself to death.
The words washed over Louie. In prison camp, Watanabe had forced him to live in incomprehensible degradation and violence. Bereft of his dignity, Louie had come home to a life lost in darkness, and had dashed himself against the memory of the Bird. But on an October night in Los Angeles, Louie had found, in Payton Jordan’s words, “daybreak.” That night, the sense of shame and powerlessness that had driven his hate the Bird had vanished. The Bird was no longer his monster. He was only a man.
In Sugamo Prison, as he was told of Watanabe’s fate, all Louie saw was a lost person, a life beyond redemption. He felt something that he had never felt fro his captor before. With a shiver of amazement, he realized that it was compassion.
At that moment, something shifted swiftly inside him. It was forgiveness, beautiful and effortless and complete. For Louie Zamperini, the was was over.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: An Olympian's Journey from Airman to Castaway to Captive

“Bright wouldn’t have another shot at the Olympics, but he would run for the rest of his life, setting masters records in his old age. Eventually he went blind, but he kept right on running, holding the end of a rope while a guide held the other. “The only problem was that most guides couldn’t run as fast as my brother, even when he was in his late seventies,” wrote his sister Georgie Bright Kunkel. “In his eighties his grandnephews would walk with him around his care center as he timed the walk on his stopwatch.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“According to his diary, he spent the journey introducing himself to every pretty girl he saw, including a total of five between Chicago and Ohio.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“With heads thrown back, legs pumping out of sync, Louie and Lash drove for the tape. With just a few yards remaining, Lash began inching up, drawing even. The two runners, legs rubbery with exhaustion, flung themselves past the judges in a finish so close, Louie later said, “you couldn’t put a hair between us.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Green Hornet being loaded for its final flight. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Non correva via da qualcosa o verso qualcosa, non correva per qualcuno o a dispetto di qualcuno: correva perché era quello che il suo corpo desiderava fare. L'irrequietezza, l'insicurezza e il bisogno di contrapporsi scomparvero.
Tutto quello che sentiva era pace.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

“actress Esther Williams on the wall. The note that Louie had left on the locker was gone, as was the liquor. Among Louie’s things, Krey found photographs that Louie had taken inside his plane. In some of them, Louie”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“He felt his consciousness slipping, his mind losing adhesion, until all he knew was a single thought: He cannot break me.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“In keeping with the American effort to reconcile with Japan, all of them, including those serving life sentences, would soon be paroled. It appears that even Sueharu Kitamura, “the Quack,” was set free, in spite of his death sentence. By 1958, every war criminal who had not been executed would be free, and on December 30 of that year, all would be granted amnesty. Sugamo would be torn down, and the epic ordeals of POWs in Japan would fade from the world’s memory.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“With arms shrunken to little more than bone and yellowed skin, the castaways waved and shouted,”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“The post-war nightmares caused my life to crumble, but thanks to a confrontation with God through the evangelist Billy Graham, I committed my life to Christ. Love replaced the hate I had for you. Christ said, “Forgive your enemies and pray for them.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Louie dug out the Bible that had been issued to him by the air corps and mailed home to his mother when he was believed dead. He walked to Barnsdall Park, where he and Cynthia had gone in better days, and where Cynthia had gone, alone, when he’d been on his benders. He found a spot under a tree, sat down, and began reading. Resting in the shade and the stillness, Louie felt profound peace. When he thought of his history, what resonated with him now was not all that he had suffered but the divine love that he believed had intervened to save him. He was not the worthless, broken, forsaken man that the Bird had striven to make of him. In a single, silent moment, his rage, his fear, his humiliation and helplessness, had fallen away. That morning, he believed, he was a new creation. Softly, he wept.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“He didn’t run from something or to something, not for anyone or in spite of anyone; he ran because it was what his body wished to do. The restiveness, the self-consciousness, and the need to oppose disappeared. All he felt was peace.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption