Goodbye, Darkness Quotes

“Inside his second-rate mind, one felt, a third-rate mind was struggling toward the surface.”
― William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War

“A man is all the people he has been. Some recollections never die. They lie in one's subconscious, squirreled away, biding their time.”
― William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War

“have another drink, and then I learn, for the hundredth time, that you can't drown your troubles, not the real ones, because if they are real they can swim.”
― William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War

“At Waterloo Pierre Cambronne commanded Napoleon's Imperial Guard. When all was lost, a British officer asked him to lay down his arms. Generations of schoolboys have been taught that he replied: “The Guard dies, but never surrenders.” Actually he said: “Merde!” (“Shit!”) The French know this; a euphemism for merde is called “the word of Cambronne.” Yet children are still told that he said what they know he did not say. So it was with me. I read Kipling, not Hemingway; Rupert Brooke, not Wilfred Owen; Gone with the Wind, not Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane. The”
― William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War

“Henry V was naturally my idol, and here we skirt one of the central events of my life: my discovery of Shakespeare. I was now fifteen. For years I had been plagued by a vocabulary of words I could understand but not pronounce because I had never heard them spoken. “Anchor” had come out “an-chore,” “colonel” as “ko-low-nall,” and I had put the accent on the third syllable of “diáspora.” But I could no longer ignore diacritical marks in dictionaries; Shakespeare cried to be read aloud. And as I did so I was stunned by his absolute mastery. In Johnson's secondhand bookstore in Springfield I found a forty-volume set of his works, with only Macbeth missing, for four dollars. I knew where I could get a Macbeth for a dime, so I paid a dollar to hold the set, and returned with the rest two months later. I have it yet, tattered and yellowing. It was the best bargain of my life. I”
― William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War

“I now knew that banners and swords, ruffles and flourishes, bugles and drums, the whole rigmarole, eventually ended in squalor. Goethe said, “There is no man so dangerous as the disillusioned idealist,” but before one can lose his illusions he must first possess them. I, to my shame, had been among the enchanted fighters. My dream of war had been colorful but puerile. It had been so evanescent, so ethereal, so wholly unrealistic that it deserved to be demolished. Later, after time had washed away the bitterness, I came to understand that.”
― William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War

“Fathers had always ruled homes like sultans, but the Depression had increased all family activities over which patresfamilias reigned; a study of over a hundred families in Pittsburgh discovered that a majority had increased family recreation — Ping-Pong, jigsaw puzzles, checkers, bridge, and parlor games, notably Monopoly. There was also plenty of time for the householders, the doughboys of 1918, to explain to their sons the indissoluble relationship between virility and valor.”
― William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War

“My generation of college men, I've been told over and over, enjoyed clinical discussions of coitus — “locker-room talk” — in which specific girls were identified. I never heard any of it, with one exception: a wheel in my fraternity who described foreplay with his fiancée and was therefore and thenceforth ostracized. He married the girl, stayed married to her, and is a major general today, but he is still remembered for that unforgivable lapse.”
― William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War

“preventing the dispatch of reinforcements to McClellan, who, had he had them, could have taken Richmond.”
― William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War