Unbroken Quotes

“his nightmares, he and the Bird fought death matches, the Bird trying to beat him to death, Louie trying to strangle the life from the sergeant. He’d been staying as far as he could from the Bird, who had been whipping about camp like a severed power line, but the sergeant always hunted him down. Then, abruptly, the violence stopped. The Bird had left camp. The guards said that he had gone to the mountains to ready the promised new camp for the POW officers. The August 22 kill-all death date was one week away. On August 15, Louie woke gravely ill. He was now having some twenty bloody bowel movements a day. After the month’s weigh-in, he didn’t record his weight in his diary, but he did note that he’d lost six kilos, more than thirteen pounds, from a frame already wasted from starvation. When he gripped his leg, his fingers sank in, and the imprints”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

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

“The turret was shot with holes, and the floor was jingling with flakes of metal and turret motor.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“From the moment that Watanabe locked eyes with Louie Zamperini, an officer, a famous Olympian, and a man for whom defiance was second nature, no man obsessed him more.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“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

“Louie and Phil were separated again, and Louie was locked in an officer’s cabin. Every few days, he had strange visits from a grinning sailor who would lean into the room, say, “Thump on the head for a biscuit?,” rap his knuckles on Louie’s head, hand him a biscuit, and amble away.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“In the air corps, 35,946 personnel died in nonbattle situations, the vast majority of them in accidental crashes.*1 Even in combat, airmen appear to have been more likely to die from accidents than combat itself. 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

“Historians estimate that the Japanese military murdered between 200,000 and 430,000 Chinese, including the 90,000 POWs, in what became known as the Rape of Nanking.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“He found several thick chocolate bars—probably Hershey’s military-issue Ration D bars—divided into segments and packaged in wax-dipped containers to resist gas attack. Designed to be unpalatably bitter so soldiers would eat them only in dire circumstances, they were formulated to be highly caloric and melt-resistant.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“By 1930, when Louie was entering his teens, California was enraptured with eugenics, and would ultimately sterilize some twenty thousand people.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“Charlie Tilghman, who flies a restored B-24 for the Commemorative Air Force, taught me about flying the Liberator.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“In a camp with a lot of dysentery and little toilet paper, newspapers were priceless.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“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. The few who were captured sometimes gave false names, believing that their families would rather think that their son had died.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“For every Allied soldier killed, four were captured; for every 120 Japanese soldiers killed, one was captured.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

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

“Airmen would later speak of sharks arriving almost the moment that their planes struck the water. In 1943, navy lieutenant Art Reading, Louie’s USC track teammate, was knocked unconscious as he ditched his two-man plane. As the plane sank, Reading’s navigator, Everett Almond, pulled Reading out, inflated their Mae Wests, and lashed himself to Reading. As Reading woke, Almond began towing him toward the nearest island, twenty miles away. Sharks soon began circling. One swept in, bit down on Almond’s leg, and dove, dragging both men deep underwater. Then something gave way and the men rose to the surface in a pool of blood. Almond’s leg had apparently been torn off. He gave his Mae West to Reading, then sank away. For the next eighteen hours, Reading floated alone, kicking at the sharks and hacking at them with his
binoculars. By the time a search boat found him, his legs were slashed and his jaw broken by the fin of a shark, but thanks to Almond, he was alive. Almond, who had died at twenty-one, was nominated for a posthumous medal for bravery.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption