Laura Hillenbrand Quotes

“And like everyone else, Louie and Phil drank. After a few beers, Louie said, it was possible to briefly forget dead friends.”

“A lifetime of glory is worth a moment of pain.”

“At that moment, something shifted sweetly inside him. It was forgiveness, beautiful and effortless and complete. For Louie Zamperini, the war was over.”

“Life was cheap in war.”

“For Louie and Phil the conversations were healing, pulling them out of their suffering and setting the future before them as a concrete thing . . . With these talks, they created something to live for.”

“Confident that he was clever, resourceful, and bold enough to escape any predicament, he was almost incapable of discouragement. When history carried him into war, this resilient optimism would define him.”

“Soldiers and civilians, intensely propagandized by their government, usually carried their own caustic prejudices about their enemies, seeing them as brutish, subhuman beasts or fearsome ‘Anglo-Saxon devils.’ This racism, and the hatred and fear it fomented served as an accelerant for the abuse of Allied prisoners.”

“If you will save me, I will serve you forever.”

“When he thought of his history, what resonated with him now was not all that he had suffered but the divine love that he believed had intervened to save him.”

“Though the captives’ resistance was dangerous, through such acts, dignity was preserved and through dignity, life itself.”

“A month earlier . . . Zamperini had been one of the greatest runners in the world, expected by many to be the first to break the four-minute mile, one of the most celebrated barriers in sport. Now his Olympian’s body had wasted to less than one hundred pounds and his famous legs could no longer lift him. Almost everyone outside of his family had given him up for dead.”

“That night, before he tried to sleep, Louie prayed. He had prayed only once before in his life, in childhood, when his mother was sick and he had been filled with a rushing fear that he would lose her. That night on the raft, in words composed in his head, never passing his lips, he pleaded for help.”

“Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it.”

“Degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.”

“This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness.”

“Men subjected to dehumanizing treatment experience profound wretchedness and loneliness and find that hope is almost impossible to retain.”

“The same attributes that had made him the boy terror . . . were keeping him alive in the greatest struggle of his life.”

“The guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else had been lost: dignity.”

“What God asks of men . . . is faith. His invisibility is the truest test of that faith. To know who sees him, God makes himself unseen.”

“What the Zamperinis were experiencing wasn’t denial, and it wasn’t hope. It was belief. . . . Their distress came not from grief but from the certainty that Louie was out there in trouble and they couldn’t reach him.”

“The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer.”

“Without dignity, identity is erased.”

“He could have ended the beatings by running away or succumbing to tears, but he refused to do either. ‘You could beat him to death . . . and he wouldn’t say ‘ouch’ or cry.’ He just put his hands in front of his face and took it.”

“If they were going to die in Japan, at least they could take a path that they and not their captors chose, declaring in this last act of life, that they remained sovereign over their own souls.”

“They bowed their heads together as Louie prayed. If God would quench their thirst, he vowed, he’d dedicate his life to him. The next day, by divine intervention or the fickle humors of the tropics, the sky broke open and rain poured down. Twice more the water ran out, twice more they prayed, and twice more the rain came.”

“Old Pops and I have got four good legs between us...Maybe that’s enough.”

“Maybe it was better to break a man’s leg than his heart.”

“Every time the horse set foot on the course, someone would cry out, ‘Here comes the Biscuit!’ and the track would come to a dead standstill.”

“It’s easy to talk to a horse if you understand his language. Horses stay the same from the day they are born until the day they die. They are only changed by the way people treat them.”

“Character reigns preeminent in determining potential.”

“His body is a paradox of mass and lightness, crafted to slip through air with the ease of an arrow. His mind is impressed with a single command: run. He pursues speed with superlative courage, pushing beyond defeat, beyond exhaustion, sometimes beyond the structural limits of bone and sinew. In flight, he is nature’s ultimate wedding of form and purpose.”

“A thoroughbred racehorse is one of God’s most impressive engines.”

“I got a great ride...The greatest ride I ever got from the greatest horse that ever lived.”

“The racehorse, by virtue of his awesome physical gifts, freed the jockey from himself. When a horse and a jockey flew over the track together, there were moments in which the man’s mind wedded itself to the animal’s body to form something greater than the sum of both parts.”

“To pilot a racehorse is to ride a half-ton catapult. It is without question on of the most formidable feats in sport. The extraordinary athleticism of the jockey is unparalleled.”

“Why rate him? He knows the poles better than I do.”

“Man is preoccupied with freedom yet laden with handicaps. The breadth of his activity and experience is narrowed by the limitations of his relatively weak, sluggish body.”

“The whole country is divided into two camps...People who never saw a horse race in their lives are taking sides. If the issue were deferred another week, there would be a civil war between the War Admiral Americans and the Seabiscuit Americans.”

“The little horse had drawn more newspaper coverage in 1938 than Roosevelt, who was Second, Hitler (third), Mussolini (fourth), or any other newsmaker. His match with War Admiral was almost certainly the single biggest news story of the year and one of the biggest sports moments of the century.”

“We had to rebuild him, both mentally and physically, but you don’t have to rebuild the heart when it’s already there”

“The affection that this inarticulate brown horse had aroused...was a most amazing thing.”

“He had a colorless translucence about him that made him seem as if he were in the earliest stages of progressive invisibility.”

“He had no money and no home; he lived entirely on the road of the racing circuit, sleeping in empty stalls, carrying with him only a saddle, his rosary, and his books...The books were the closest things he had to furniture, and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.”

“He believed with complete conviction that no animal was permanently ruined. Every horse could be improved. He lived by a single maxim: ‘Learn your horse. Each one is an individual, and once you penetrate his mind and heart, you can often work wonders with an otherwise intractable beast.‘”

“So long, Charley.”