Serenade to the Big Bird Quotes

“Day after day we were on the list, for a trip to Berlin or Nancy or Munich or somewhere. We weren’t meeting any new people, or learning anything constructive, or deepening our understanding or cementing any friendships.
We just went up there and over, to knock hell out of some city with the vague hope that some day that city will be rebuilt for some people we can get along with. Offhand it always seemed like a sort of sick way of doing things, and when the day turns up that we can start using other methods, I’m going to be one of the gladder people in the world.”
― Bert Stiles, Serenade to the Big Bird

“Down the other way to the right lay the vast mystery of West China and the Himalayas, unknown, uncharted, brooding, sleeping, buried behind fear and time and the ranges of always-white mountains.”
― Bert Stiles, Serenade To The Big Bird

“I’ll never know how many people I helped to kill. Sometime later, when there is a lull, I’ll sit alone and wonder about that. It’s an ugly thing we do to your city.

Nobody can hand all the responsibility for this war to you, and no country has a corner on all the sons of bitches. There are some sad apples in every land and in every town, but they never took over quite so completely anywhere, as they have in your land and in your town.. [...] Someday, maybe, this senseless ugliness will stop.”
― Bert Stiles, Serenade to the Big Bird

“Every time we came back from a rough mission we had to shake up the line-up and twice we had to find a whole new infield. They had a hot club in our squadron once before, the best in the whole division and then they went to Schweinfurt.”
― Bert Stiles, Serenade to the Big Bird: A Young Flier’s Moving Memoir of the Second World War

“Every time they have time to queue up and come slow-rolling through, plenty of people get killed. The most hopeless feeling in the world is when you just have to sit there and wait for it, knowing you're either going to be dead in a couple of seconds, or you're still going to be one of the lucky ones, one of the breathing ones who came through it.”
― Bert Stiles, Serenade to the Big Bird: A Young Flier’s Moving Memoir of the Second World War