Ghosts of Hiroshima Quotes

“It struck Thurlow as odd that whatever the flash was, it seemed to have set the roofs of buildings afire first. Smoke, black and full of thick soot, came blowing through the apparently deserted streets. The soot carried a stench like scorched squid. It did not occur to her yet that she might be inhaling people.”
― Charles Pellegrino, Ghosts of Hiroshima

“Beneath the waterline, they were also able to hear, at a distance, the turbulence of a strengthening typhoon. At twenty knots, the captain steered directly toward the storm, and the rest of the little fleet followed, in a desperate effort to render targeting by the submarines impossible by driving straight into the storm’s towering waves. Of Baxter’s estimated thirty ships that started out from Java, soon only five remained, en route to what was rumored to be a work-to-death coal mine somewhere on mainland Japan. During the storm, prisoners actually heard, through the hull, ships being sunk by wind and waves and imploding before they dropped just a few hundred feet below. They heard large deck structures torn off their own ship and washed over the side. The shifting piles of caustic bauxite kicked up immense quantities of dust and threatened to suffocate them if the stench of uprooted makeshift latrines did not do so first. Baxter tried to console his companions by remarking, “Somewhere, there is always someone worse off than ourselves.”
― Charles Pellegrino, Ghosts of Hiroshima

“Not many people would appreciate, in years to come, that America’s “silly” Duck and Cover film—which would draw decades of mockery by suggesting that one could be protected by ducking beneath a white picnic sheet during the critical first second of a nuclear flash—was scientifically correct, derived from the actual experiences of atomic-bomb survivors.”
― Charles Pellegrino, Ghosts of Hiroshima

“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

“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

“we human beings can never be so frightening to history or to ourselves as when huge numbers of us all go crazy together.”
― Charles Pellegrino, Ghosts of Hiroshima

“War plays unfair tricks with fate; it cheapens human life to the level of a worm.”
― 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

“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