Ghosts of Hiroshima Quotes

“Scattered in random fashion throughout a city of a quarter-million people—a city in which survival appeared to be governed by sheer chance—any two random survivors were all but guaranteed to be strangers. But despite an arithmetic that should have rendered the survivors strangers, their lives tended to defy probability, becoming oddly connected.”
― Charles Pellegrino, Ghosts of Hiroshima

“There are punishments and curses given to us in life for nothing we personally did wrong, and occasionally for things we did right. What we do with such blessings—that is the true measure of the human being.—Victor Chan and J. R. Finch, personal communication (2010)”
― Charles Pellegrino, Ghosts of Hiroshima

“The bombs of August 1945 had an unanticipated side effect that frightened the scientists and engineers who first entered the two cities—and which summarized the dawn of atomic death in a lesson they and the world should never forget. During that first split second of an atomic bomb’s awakening, people, animals, plants, and inanimate objects left shadows on flash-burned surfaces. Although a boy named Toshihiko Matsuda survived for many hours after being flash-burned on one side of his body and irradiated by neutron spray and gamma rays, his shadow continued to speak for him on a garden wall, seven city blocks from the Hiroshima bomb’s point of detonation.”
― Charles Pellegrino, Ghosts of Hiroshima

“Ever since Moment Zero in Hiroshima”
― Charles Pellegrino, Ghosts of Hiroshima

“Each of you,” he began to teach, “though you may only be a single human being—each of you can, on your own, help us to start understanding each other. That’s all it takes: small steps. That’s all you have to remember. Send simple acts of kindness outward, from person to person. Send forth kindness like a contagious disease.” What could be easier? Yamaguchi wondered. He realized that his hope of change through individual acts of mutual human tenderness might sound simplistic—completely naive, even—“but if we follow such principles, then we must emerge from the experience of war not as Japanese or American, not as Christian or Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim, or Jew or Shinto, but simply as . . . human beings. We have to start somewhere. Have to.”⁠xiv”
― Charles Pellegrino, Ghosts of Hiroshima

“All for one and one for all. One humanity, or none.”
― Charles Pellegrino, Ghosts of Hiroshima

“Please,” he said, “everyone, study history with earnest and think about the nobility and the importance of peace.”
― Charles Pellegrino, Ghosts of Hiroshima

“The history of civilization is written in humanity’s perversion of nature.”
― Charles Pellegrino, Ghosts of Hiroshima