Unbroken Quotes

“Watanabe would later admit that in the beginning of his life in exile, he had pondered the question of whether or not he had committed any crime. In the end, he laid the blame not on himself but on “sinful, absurd, insane war.” He saw himself as a victim.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“With communism wicking across the Far East, America’s leaders began to see a future alliance with Japan as critical to national security. The sticking point was the war-crimes issue; the trials were intensely unpopular in Japan, spurring a movement seeking the release of all convicted war criminals. With the pursuit of justice for POWs suddenly in conflict with America’s security goals, something had to give.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

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

“The Pacific POWs who went home in 1945 were torn-down men. They had an intimate understanding of man’s vast capacity to experience suffering, as well as his equally vast capacity, and hungry willingness, to inflict it. They carried unspeakable memories of torture and humiliation, and an acute sense of vulnerability that attended the knowledge of how readily they could be disarmed and dehumanized. Many felt lonely and isolated, having endured abuses that ordinary people couldn’t understand. Their dignity had been obliterated, replaced with a pervasive sense of shame and worthlessness.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“McMullen came out of Japan racked by nightmares and so nervous that he was barely able to speak cogently. When he told his story to his family, his father accused him of lying and forbade him to speak of the war. Shattered and deeply depressed, McMullen couldn’t eat, and his weight plunged back down to ninety pounds. He went to a veterans’ hospital, but the doctors simply gave him B12 shots.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Some former POWs became almost feral with rage. For many men, seeing an Asian person or overhearing a snippet of Japanese left them shaking, weeping, enraged, or lost in flashbacks. One former POW, normally gentle and quiet, spat at every Asian person he saw. At Letterman General Hospital just after the war, four former POWs tried to attack a staffer who was of Japanese ancestry, not knowing that he was an American veteran. Troubled former POWs found nowhere to turn.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Finally, there was the formidable difficulty of navigation. Making extraordinarily complex spherical trigonometry calculations based on figures taken from a crowd of instruments, navigators groped over thousands of miles of featureless ocean toward targets or destination islands that were blacked out at night, often only yards wide, and flat to the horizon. Even with all the instruments, the procedures could be comically primitive. “Each time I made a sextant calibration,” wrote navigator John Weller, “I would open the escape hatch on the flight deck and stand on my navigation desk and the radio operator’s desk while [the radioman] held on to my legs so I would not be sucked out of the plane.” At night, navigators sometimes resorted to following the stars, guiding their crews over the Pacific by means not so different from those used by ancient Polynesian mariners. In a storm or clouds, even that was impossible.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Louie grabbed the flare gun, loaded it, and fired. The flare shot straight at the bomber; for a moment, the men thought that it would hit the plane. But the flare missed, passing alongside the plane, making a fountain of red that looked huge from the raft. Louie reloaded and fired again. The plane turned sharply right. Louie fired two more flares, past the tail.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Louie came upon a reporter staring into a crater, in tears. Louie walked to him, bracing to see a dead body. Instead, he saw a typewriter, flattened.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Louie killed time by sleeping on Mitchell’s navigator table and taking flying lessons from Phil. On some flights, he sprawled behind the cockpit, reading Ellery Queen novels and taxing the nerves of Douglas, who eventually got so annoyed at having to step over Louie’s long legs that he attacked him with a fire extinguisher.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“They were alone on sixty-four million square miles of ocean. A month earlier,”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“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

“A fantastically huge, roiling cloud, glowing bluish gray, swaggered over the city. It was more than three miles tall. Below it Hiroshima was boiling.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

“He stowed a bottle of a local rotgut called Five Island Gin—nicknamed Five Ulcer Gin—in radioman Harry Brooks’s gas mask holster. When an MP tapped Brooks’s hip to check for the mask, the bottle broke and left Brooks with a soggy leg. It was probably for the best. Louie noticed that when he drank the stuff, his chest hair spontaneously fell out. He later discovered that Five Island Gin was often used as paint thinner. After that, he stuck to beer.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“To expand his lung capacity, he ran to the public pool at Redondo Beach, dove to the bottom, grabbed the drain plug, and just floated there, hanging on a little longer each time. Eventually, he could stay underwater for three minutes and forty-five seconds. People kept jumping in to save him.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“The average army or army air forces Pacific POW had lost sixty-one pounds in captivity, a remarkable statistic given that roughly three-quarters of the men had weighed just 159 pounds or less upon enlistment.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“circling toward them again. As it leveled off, Zamperini could see the muzzles of the machine guns, aimed directly at them. Zamperini looked toward his crewmates. They were too weak to go back in the water. As they lay down on the floor of the raft, hands over their heads,”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Where There’s still Life, There’s still Hope!”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

“The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when they make their tormentors suffer.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“But on Kwajalein, the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else had been lost: dignity. This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind. Men subjected to dehumanization 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 their circumstances in which they are forced to live.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

“The only break in the gloom came from a guard who would saunter down the barracks aisle, pause before each cell, raise one leg, and fart at each captive. He never quite succeeded in farting his way down the entire cell block.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: An Olympian's Journey from Airman to Castaway to Captive

“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 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

“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. Louie shone with sweat.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

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

“As the train pushed off for Yokohama, the POWs’ last sight of Naoetsu was a broken line of Japanese, the few civilian guards and camp staffers who had been kind to them, standing along the side of the track. Their hands were raised in salute.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Askim was notorious for his kleptomania; the Zamperinis lived above a grocery, and the dog made regular shoplifting runs downstairs, snatching food and fleeing. His name was a clever joke: When people asked what the dog’s name was, they were invariably confused by the reply, which sounded like “Ask him.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“They bowed their heads together as Louie prayed. If God would quench their thirst, he vowed, he’d dedicate his life to him. The next day, by divine intervention or the fickle humors of the tropics, the sky broke open and rain poured down. Twice more the water ran out, twice more they prayed, and twice more the rain came. The showers gave them just enough water to last a short while longer. If only a plane would come.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Every airman was given a “Mae West” life vest,*3 but because some men stole the vests’ carbon dioxide cartridges for use in carbonating drinks, some vests didn’t inflate.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“it was believed that the former sergeant, hunted, exiled and in despair, had stabbed himself to death.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“The ship passed over Nuremberg, where fringe politician Adolf Hitler, whose Nazi Party had been trounced in the 1928 elections, had just delivered a speech touting selective infanticide.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption