Unbroken Quotes

“What mystified Louie was his escape from the wreckage. If he had passed out from the pressure, and the plane had continued to sink and the pressure to build, why had he woken again? And how had he been loosed from the wires while unconscious?”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“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 faded the most. Louie and Phil’s optimism, and Mac’s hopelessness, were becoming self-fulfilling.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“On Kwajalein, Louie and Phil learned a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler’s death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people. Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty. In places like Kwajalein, degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“During forced exercise one day, Louie fell into step with William Harris, a twenty-five-year-old marine officer, the son of marine general Field Harris. Tall and dignified, with a face cut in hard lines, Harris had been captured in the surrender of Corregidor in May 1942. With another American,* he had escaped and embarked on an eight-and-a-half-hour swim across Manila Bay, kicking through a downpour in darkness as fish bit him. Dragging himself ashore on the Japanese-occupied Bataan Peninsula, he had begun a run for China, hiking through jungles and over mountains, navigating the coast in boats donated by sympathetic Filipinos, hitching rides on burros, and surviving in part by eating ants. He had joined a Filipino guerrilla band, but when he had heard of the American landing at Guadalcanal, the marine in him had called. Making a dash by boat toward Australia in hopes of rejoining his unit, he had gotten as far as the Indonesian island of Morotai before his journey ended. Civilians had turned him in to the Japanese, who had discovered that he was a general’s son and sent him to Ofuna. Even here, he was itching to escape.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“With secret delight, he began teaching Bad Eye catastrophically bad English. From that day forward, when asked, “How are you?,” Bad Eye would smilingly reply, “What the fuck do you care?”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“In the morning he rose to run again. 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

“Louie never saw a Chong diner finish his meal.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“When Louie was in his sixties, he was still climbing Cahuenga Peak every week and running a mile in under six minutes. In his seventies, he discovered skateboarding. At eighty-five, he returned to Kwajalein on a project, ultimately unsuccessful,”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“the athletes were treated to a thunderous show that culminated in the release of twenty thousand doves. As the birds circled in panicked confusion, cannons began firing, prompting the birds to relieve themselves over the athletes. With each report, the birds let fly.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

“A moment of pain is worth a lifetime of glory”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

“Louie was on the raft. There was gentle Phil crumpled up before him, Mac’s breathing skeleton, endless ocean stretching away in every direction, the sun lying over them, the cunning bodies of the sharks, waiting, circling. He was a body on a raft, dying of thirst. He felt words whisper from his swollen lips. It was a promise thrown at heaven, a promise he had not kept, a promise he had allowed himself to forget until just this instant: If you will save me, I will serve you forever. And then, standing under a circus tent on a clear night in downtown Los Angeles, Louie felt rain falling. It was the last flashback he would ever have. Louie let go of Cynthia and turned toward Graham. He felt supremely alive. He began walking. “This is it,” said Graham. “God has spoken to you. You come on.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

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

“Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and
asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty. In places like Kwajalein, degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

“Above him, floating in a bright cloud, he saw human figures, silhouetted against the sky. He counted twenty-one of them. They were singing the sweetest song he had ever heard.
Louie stared up, astonished, listening to the singing. What he was seeing and hearing was impossible, and yet he felt absolutely lucid. This was, he felt certain, no hallucination, no vision. He sat under the singers, listening to their voices, memorizing the melody, until they faded away. Phil had heard and seen nothing. Whatever this had been, Louie concluded, it belonged to him alone.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

“I’m free!”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“When Bad Eye asked Marvin to teach him English, Marvin saw his chance. With secret delight, he began teaching Bad Eye catastrophically bad English. From that day forward, when asked, “How are you?,” Bad Eye would smilingly reply, “What the fuck do you care?”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“In the distance, the bomber swung around and began flying at the rafts again. Louie hoped that the crew had realized the mistake and was returning to help them. Flying about two hundred feet over the water, the bomber raced at them, following a path slightly parallel to the rafts, so that its side passed into view. All three men saw it at once. Behind the wing, painted over the waist, was a red circle. The bomber was Japanese.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“The Olympic Village wasn’t empty for long. The cottages became military barracks. With the Olympics over and his usefulness for propaganda expended, the village’s designer, Captain Fürstner, learned that he was to be cashiered from the Wehrmacht because he was a Jew. He killed himself. Less than twenty miles away, in the town of Oranienburg, the first prisoners were being hauled into the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Their hunger dimmed, an ominous sign. They had reached the last stage of starvation.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind. Men subjected to dehumanizing treatment experience profound wretchedness and loneliness and find that hope is almost impossible to retain. Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live. One American airman, shot down and relentlessly debased by his Japanese captors, described the state of mind that his captivity created: "I was literally becoming a lesser human being.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

“This, this little home,” he said, “was worth all of it.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“daughter-in-law, Cecy, with whom she had become dear friends.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“For these men, the central struggle of postwar life was to restore their dignity and find a way to see the world as something other than menacing blackness.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“In its rampage over the east, Japan had brought atrocity and death on a scale that staggers the imagination. In the midst of it were the prisoners of war. Japan held some 132,000 POWs from America, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Holland, and Australia. Of those, nearly 36,000 died, more than one in every four.* Americans fared particularly badly; of the 34,648 Americans held by Japan, 12,935—more than 37 percent—died.* By comparison, only 1 percent of Americans held by the Nazis and Italians died. Japan murdered thousands of POWs on death marches, and worked thousands of others to death in slavery, including some 16,000 POWs who died alongside as many as 100,000 Asian laborers forced to build the Burma-Siam Railway. Thousands of other POWs were beaten, burned, stabbed, or clubbed to death, shot, beheaded, killed during medical experiments, or eaten alive in ritual acts of cannibalism. And as a result of being fed grossly inadequate and befouled food and water, thousands more died of starvation and easily preventable diseases. Of the 2,500 POWs at Borneo’s Sandakan camp, only 6, all escapees, made it to September 1945 alive. Left out of the numbing statistics are untold numbers of men who were captured and killed on the spot or dragged to places like Kwajalein, to be murdered without the world ever learning their fate. In accordance with the kill-all order, the Japanese massacred all 5,000 Korean captives on Tinian, all of the POWs on Ballale, Wake, and Tarawa, and all but 11 POWs at Palawan. They were evidently about to murder all the other POWs and civilian internees in their custody when the atomic bomb brought their empire crashing down. On the morning of September 2, 1945, Japan signed its formal surrender. The Second World War was over.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Returning home to the postwar housing shortage, Weinstein took out a $600,000 loan, built an apartment complex in Atlanta, and offered the 140 family units to veterans at rents averaging less than $50 per month. “Priorities: 1) Ex-POWs; 2) Purple Heart Vets; 3) Overseas Vets; 4) Vets; 5) Civilians,” read his ad. “… We prefer Ex-GI’s, and Marines and enlisted personnel of the Navy. Ex–Air Corps men may apply if they quit telling us how they won the war.” His rule banning KKK members drew threatening phone calls. “I gave them my office and my home address,” Weinstein said, “and told them I still had the .45 I used to shoot carabau [water buffalo] with.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“This wasn’t a POW camp. It was a secret interrogation center called Ofuna, where “high-value” captured men were housed in solitary confinement, starved, tormented, and tortured to divulge military secrets. Because Ofuna was kept secret from the outside world, the Japanese operated with an absolutely free hand. The men in Ofuna, said the Japanese, weren’t POWs; they were “unarmed combatants” at war against Japan and, as such, didn’t have the rights that international law accorded POWs. In fact, they had no rights at all. If captives “confessed their crimes against Japan,” they’d be treated “as well as regulations permit.” Over the course of the war, some one thousand Allied captives would be hauled into Ofuna, and many would be held there for years.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“When Louie was in his sixties, he was still climbing Cahuenga Peak every week and running a mile in under six minutes.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“On July 13, Louise felt a wave of urgency. She penned a letter to Major General Willis Hale, commander of the Seventh Air Force. In it, she begged Hale not to give up searching; Louie, she wrote, was alive. Unbeknownst to Louise, on that same day, Louie was captured.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“In December 1935, Louie graduated from high school; a few weeks later, he rang in 1936 with his thoughts full of Berlin. The Olympic trials track finals would be held in New York in July, and the Olympic committee would base its selection of competitors on a series of qualifying races. Louie had seven months to run himself onto the team. In the meantime, he also had to figure out what to do about the numerous college scholarships being offered to him. Pete had won a scholarship to the University of Southern California, where he had become one of the nation’s top ten college milers. He urged Louie to accept USC’s offer but delay entry until the fall, so he could train full-time. So Louie moved into Pete’s frat house and, with Pete coaching him, trained obsessively. All day, every day, he lived and breathed the 1,500 meters and Berlin.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption