Unbroken Quotes

“Few societies treasured dignity, and feared humiliation, as did the Japanese, for whom a loss of honor could merit suicide. This is likely one of the reasons why Japanese soldiers in World War II debased their prisoners with such zeal, seeking to take from them that which was most painful and destructive to lose.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“As Louie bent, gasping, over his spent legs, he marveled at the kick that he had forced from his body. It had felt very, very fast. Two coaches hurried up, gaping at their stopwatches, on which they had clocked his final lap. Both watches showed precisely the same time. In distance running in the 1930s, it was exceptionally rare for a man to run a last lap in one minute. This rule held even in the comparatively short hop of a mile: In the three fastest miles ever run, the winner’s final lap had been clocked at 61.2, 58.9, and 59.1 seconds, respectively. No lap in those three historic performances had been faster than 58.9. In the 5,000, well over three miles, turning a final lap in less than 70 seconds was a monumental feat. In his record-breaking 1932 Olympic 5,000, Lehtinen had spun his final lap in 69.2 seconds. Louie had run his last lap in 56 seconds.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“In September 1942, a B-17 crashed in the Pacific, stranding nine men on a raft. Within a few days, one had died and the rest had gone mad.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“In World War II, 35,933 AAF planes were lost in combat and accidents. The surprise of the attrition rate is that only a fraction of the ill-fated planes were lost in combat. In 1943 in the Pacific Ocean Areas theater in which Phil’s crew served, for every plane lost in combat, some six planes were lost in accidents. Over time, combat took a greater toll, but combat losses never overtook noncombat losses.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“His features, which would later settle into pleasant collaboration, was growing at different rates, giving him a curious face that seemed designed by committee.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

“I come away from this book with the deepest appreciation for what these men endured, and what they sacrificed, for the good of humanity. It is to them that this book is dedicated. Laura Hillenbrand May 2010”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“The biggest chore of training was coping with
the nitpicking, rank-pulling, much-loathed lieutenant who oversaw their flights.
Once, when one of Super Man’s engines quit during a routine flight, Phil turned the
plane back and landed at Kahuku, only to be accosted by the furious lieutenant in a
speeding jeep, ordering them back up. When Louie offered to fly on three engines so
long as the lieutenant joined them, the lieutenant abruptly changed his mind.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

“I wish to remember the millions of Allied servicemen and prisoners of war who lived the story of the Second World War.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“schoolteacher.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Phil was a deeply religious man, carrying a faith instilled in him by his parents. “I had told Al several times before to always do his best as he knew how to do it,” Phil’s father once wrote, “and when things get beyond his skill and ability to ask the Lord to step in and help out.” Phil never spoke of his faith, but as he sang hymns over the ocean, conjuring up a protective God, perhaps rescue felt closer, despair more distant.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“In September 1942, a B-17 crashed in the Pacific, stranding nine men on a raft. Within a few days, one had died and the rest had gone mad. Two heard music and baying dogs. One was convinced that a navy plane was pushing the raft from behind. Two scuffled over an imaginary case of beer. Another shouted curses at a sky that he believed was full of bombers. Seeing a delusory boat, he pitched himself overboard and drowned. On day six, when a plane flew by, the remaining men had to confer to be sure that it was real. When they were rescued on day seven, they were too weak to wave their arms.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“the record for inflated raft survival appears to have been set in 1942, when three navy plane crash victims survived for thirty-four days on the Pacific before reaching an island, where they were sheltered by natives.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Only the Laundry Knew How Scared I Was”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Blackout curtains were hung in windows across America, from solitary farmhouses to the White House.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“What are your thoughts about Mac, who panicked and ate all the chocolate on the raft on the first night but later tried hard to help out? At first, I thought, wow, I’ve got a real problem with him. But every time he did something right I knew I had to compliment him, and he just kept changing and changing. One day the sharks were jumping on the raft trying to take me out, two of them, one right after the other. I’m pushing them back into the water with my hand on the ends of their noses. And then Mac grabs an oar and the two of us were punching them out with the oars, and they finally gave up. Well, boy, I really complimented Mac, and he kept getting better and better. He just turned out beautifully, and it was breaking my heart to see him dying.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: An Olympian's Journey from Airman to Castaway to Captive

“What God asks of men, said Graham, is faith. His invisibility is the truest test of that faith. To know who sees him, God makes himself unseen.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“What the Zamperinis were experiencing wasn’t denial, and it wasn’t hope. It was belief.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Am I ever happy,” he wrote to Louie. “I have to go around with my shirt open so that I have enough room for my chest.” Louie”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Pillsbury shouted the only word that came to mind. “Ow!”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: An Olympian's Journey from Airman to Castaway to Captive

“Pete urged Louie to enter the Compton Open and try his legs at a longer distance. “If you stay with Norman Bright,” he told Louie, “you make the Olympic team.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“From this day forward, until victory or defeat, transfer, discharge, capture, or death took them from it, the vast Pacific would be beneath and around them. Its bottom was already littered with downed warplanes and the ghosts of lost airmen. Every day of this long and ferocious war, more would join them.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“In the 1930s, America was infatuated with the pseudoscience of eugenics and its promise of strengthening the human race by culling the “unfit” from the genetic pool. Along with the “feebleminded,” insane, and criminal, those so classified included women who had sex out of wedlock (considered a mental illness), orphans, the disabled, the poor, the homeless, epileptics, masturbators, the blind and the deaf, alcoholics, and girls whose genitals exceeded certain measurements. Some eugenicists advocated euthanasia, and in mental hospitals, this was quietly carried out on scores of people through “lethal neglect” or outright murder.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“In Torrance, a one-boy insurgency was born.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“As he watched this beautiful, still world, Louie played with a thought that had come to him before. He had thought it as he had watched hunting seabirds, marveling at their ability to adjust their dives to compensate for the refraction of light in water. He had thought it as he had considered the pleasing geometry of the sharks, their gradation of color, their slide through the sea. He even recalled the thought coming to him in his youth, when he had lain on the roof of the cabin in the Cahuilla Indian Reservation, looking up from Zane Grey to watch night settling over the earth. Such beauty, he thought, was too perfect to have come about by mere chance. That day in the center of the Pacific was, to him, a gift crafted deliberately, compassionately, for him and Phil. Joyful and grateful in the midst of slow dying, the two men bathed in that day until sunset brought it, and their time in the doldrums, to an end.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“A report issued by 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

“Zamperini looked toward his crewmates. They were too weak”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“With only hook latches for locks, Louise took to sitting by the front door on an apple box with a rolling pin in her hand, ready to brain any prowlers who might threaten her children.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“It remains a mystery why these three young men, veterans of the same training and the same crash, differed so radically in their perceptions of their plight. Maybe the difference was biological; some men may be wired for optimism, others for doubt. As a toddler, Louie had leapt from a train”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Louie, declared dead more than sixty years earlier, would outlive them all.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“In Japan’s militaristic society, all citizens, from earliest childhood, were relentlessly indoctrinated with the lesson that to be captured in war was intolerably shameful. The 1941 Japanese Military Field Code made clear what was expected of those facing capture: “Have regard for your family first. Rather than live and bear the shame of imprisonment, the soldier must die and avoid leaving a dishonorable name.” As a result, in many hopeless battles, virtually every Japanese soldier fought to the death. For every Allied soldier killed, four were captured; for every 120 Japanese soldiers killed, one was captured. In some losing battles, Japanese soldiers committed suicide en masse to avoid capture.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption