Best Quotes from Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand with Page Numbers

He was, in the summer of ’29, the wonder of the world.

It was, he would say, "fearfully beautiful."

Confident that he was clever, resourceful, and bold enough to escape any predicament, he was almost incapable of discouragement.

Louie idolized Pete, who watched over him and their younger sisters, Sylvia and Virginia, with paternal protectiveness.

You could beat him to death... and he wouldn’t say ‘ouch’ or cry.

Frustrated at his inability to defend himself, he made a study of it.

The feeling of lightness that Louie experienced on his walk home was one he would never forget.

For all her efforts, Louise couldn’t change Louie.

He was “bighearted,” said Pete. “Louie would give away anything, whether it was his or not.”

Aloof and bristling, he lurked around the edges of Torrance.

"If Louie were recognized for doing something right, he’d turn his life around."

"Everyone ran, he followed, churning along with jimmying elbows and dropping far behind."

"The applause was intoxicating, and the prospect of more was just enough incentive to keep him marginally compliant."

"He didn’t run from something or to something, not for anyone or in spite of anyone; he ran because it was what his body wished to do."

"All of the effort that I’d once put into thieving I threw into track."

"He graduated to the tail of the family mule... eventually, hanging off the tail of an obliging horse named Paint, he began to run."

"Louie had a rare biomechanical advantage, hips that rolled as he ran."

"His transformation was stunning. Competing in black silk shorts... he won an 880-yard race... by more than two seconds."

"After he flew past the finish, rewriting the course record, he looked back up the long straightaway. Not one of the other runners was even in view."

"It was from the realization of what he was."

Louie would go to the track, limber up, lie on his stomach on the infield grass, visualizing his coming race.

Louie wanted to run in Berlin more than he had ever wanted anything.

He believed he could be among them. 'If I have any strength left from the heat,' he wrote to Pete, 'I’ll beat Bright and give Lash the scare of his life.'

He was simply too young. He was heartbroken.

He had nothing to lose.

In the spring, he began to realize that he wasn’t going to make it.

The race... was a barn burner.

The two runners, legs rubbery with exhaustion, flung themselves past the judges in a finish so close, Louie later said, 'you couldn’t put a hair between us.'

The judges ruled that it was Lash, not Zamperini, who had won....The hometown boy had made the Olympic team.

Louie’s time was called a 'world interscholastic' record... He was the youngest distance runner to ever make the team.

A lifetime of glory is worth a moment of pain.

If the joker does not appeal to you, throw it away and keep this for good luck.

All I had, I gave it.

Let go.

Where it all went, I don't know.

The biggest meal I ever ate in my life.

He wanted a souvenir of the happy time he had had in beautiful Germany.

I didn’t only start too slow, I ran too slow.

Their fingers barely touched.

The shining hair was far away, then nearer.

"There’s the next mile champion... When he concentrates on this distance, he’ll be unbeatable."

"Cunningham, too, had changed his mind. He thought that four minutes might be within Louie’s reach."

"Every night that May, he climbed the coliseum fence, dropped into the stadium, and ran the stairs until his legs went numb."

"Bleeding and in pain, Louie was trapped."

"He burst through, blew past the race leader, and, with his shoe torn open, shins streaming blood, and chest aching, won easily."

"Louie had run the mile in 4:08.3. It was the fastest NCAA mile in history and the fifth-fastest outdoor mile ever run."

"Weeks later, Japan withdrew as host of the 1940 Olympics, and the Games were transferred to Finland. Adjusting his aspirations from Tokyo to Helsinki, Louie rolled on."

"Louie was unmoored. He became ill, first with food poisoning, then with pleurisy."

"His speed abandoned him, and he lost race after race."

"Louie joined the Army Air Corps."

It was the kind of story that was filling the letters of would-be airmen all over the country.

For all its ugliness and quirks, it was a noble thing, rugged and inexhaustible.

In the grim business of bombs and bullets, there was no better crew in the squadron.

Each man was assigned to a crash station, which in Louie’s case was by the waist window behind the right wing.

They were going to Hawaii.

Louie described it as 'our home'.

Phil's crew spent part of a rainy morning sitting in a briefing room with another crew as they awaited flights.

Louie and Phillips fell in together.

In a crisis, Louie would learn, Phillips’s veins ran icewater.

They had their first scare at Ephrata.

"This is it, boys."

"I gave the skipper an F for identification, but an A+ for a quick dive."

"It looked like a star storm."

"Their destination was likely 'a long hop somewhere.'"

"Louie scrawled Marge and Payton Jordan on a bomb."

"His bomb fell just behind it, lighting up the runway."

"Every gun in the world seemed to be firing skyward."

"With the bomb bay yawning open and dragging against the air, the plane was burning much more fuel than usual."

"The mission had been a smashing success."

"It had all been so easy."

"Only the laundry knew how scared I was."

"After only two months and one combat mission, five of their friends were already dead."

"Life was cheap in war."

"As planes went, so went men."

"It’s amazing that any crews found their destinations."

"Airmen avoided the subject of death, but privately, many were tormented by fear."

"If a crewman went mad during a mission, would the crew shoot him?"

"Men didn’t go one by one. A quarter of a barracks was lost at once."

"The dead weren’t numbers on a page. They were their roommates, their drinking buddies."

"In a war without funerals, it was the best they could do."

"The courage to face the unknown is what makes a hero."

"In the face of desperation, it is hope that carries us forward."

"When all seems lost, the human spirit can still soar."

"We are defined not by our struggles, but by how we rise from them."

"No obstacle is too great when we stand together in adversity."

"In every battle, there lies the potential for redemption and resilience."

"Courage doesn't always roar; sometimes it is the quiet voice at the end of the day that says, 'I will try again tomorrow.'"

"The darkest moments often illuminate the true strength within us."

"True bravery is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it."

"In times of great peril, we discover the depths of our resolve."

When they had a moment, they walked to the beach and sat together for an hour, trying to collect their thoughts.

If we’re hit, one man grumbled, there’ll be nothing left of us but gravy.

As he dug in the dark with the bombs coming, one man noisily cursed the sonofabitch generals who had left the atoll without shelters.

I wasn’t only scared, I was terrified.

With dawn broke, men began creeping from their hiding places.

He would think of it as a dear friend.

The plane had saved him and all but one of his crew.

When a drunken hothead tried to pick a fight, Phil stared back indifferently, but Louie obliged.

A bomb struck the tent in which Louie and Phil had been sleeping a minute before.

The wounded and dead were everywhere.

Louie was in the best shape of his life.

There was only one ship, ‘The Green Hornet,’ a ‘musher.’

If we’re not back in a week, it read, help yourself to the booze.

Phil felt strangely devoid of fear.

Nobody’s going to live through this.

The plane disintegrated around him.

Louie felt intensely alive.

He recalled the bulkhead in front of him and thought of how his skull would strike it.

He was now gulping reflexively, swallowing salt water.

He burst into dazzling daylight.

"I’m glad it was you, Zamp."

"The provisions were grossly inadequate."

"We’re going to die!"

"Eat one square of chocolate in the morning, one in the evening."

"Each man would eat one square of chocolate in the morning, one in the evening."

"Louie made a deliberate effort to avoid thinking about the men who had died."

"The sun sank, and it became sharply cold."

"The ocean was a jumble of bomber remains."

"Louie grabbed an oar and circled around as rapidly as he could, searching for the drowning man."

"The last trace of Green Hornet... faded away."

"We kept hoping, hoping, hoping …"

"If we ever looked for something on a mission, that day we were looking."

"You could do nothing about it."

"The current was carrying them far from the paths trafficked by friendly aircraft."

"If he has a toothbrush and a pocket knife and he hits land, he'll make it."

"A fierce conviction came over Louise. She was absolutely certain that her son was alive."

"Their bodies were declining. Other than Mac's feast on the chocolate bars, none of them had eaten since their early morning breakfast before their last flight."

"The sighting left the castaways with one important piece of information."

"He was trying to get a message to the boys who knew him, a sign of hope in their darkest hour."

"The plane made a hasty landing, and Pillsbury was bandaged up and sent back to his gun."

"The sun lay upon the men, scalding their skin."

"Desperately thirsty and overheated, the men could do no more than use their hands to bail seawater over themselves."

"They threw back their heads, spilled their bodies back, spread their arms, and opened their mouths. The rain fell on their chests, lips, faces, tongues."

"Knowing how to survive took everything they had, and it was the smallest victories that pushed them forward."

"Louie was determined that no matter what happened to their bodies, their minds would stay under their control."

"They conjured up the scene in such vivid detail that somehow their stomachs were fooled by it, if only briefly."

"Phil revived it in his mind, spreading a blanket on the infield grass, heaping it with food, and watching the cars blur past."

"Though Phil was constantly wondering how long this would go on, it had not yet occurred to him that he might die."

"Louie’s success in carrying them off had given him the conviction that he could think his way around any boundary."

"Though all three men faced the same hardship, their differing perceptions of it appeared to be shaping their fates."

"Hope is like a light—it can shine even in the darkest places."

"Courage doesn’t always roar; sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’"

"Even in the face of overwhelming challenges, the human spirit can find a way to endure."

"Sometimes the hardest battles are the ones we fight within ourselves."

"The greatest strength comes not from the absence of fear, but from the willingness to face it head-on."

"In the depths of despair, we can find our true selves and rise above the darkness."

"Resilience is not just about survival; it’s about thriving against all odds."

"No matter how dire the circumstances, there’s always hope for a better tomorrow."

"To be unbroken means to face adversity with unyielding determination and unwavering courage."

"Even amidst chaos, we can create our own order and find paths to salvation."

He had pushed himself beyond his body’s capacities, but the frightened, childlike expression had left his face. Mac had reclaimed himself.

If the sharks were going to try to eat him, he was going to try to eat them.

Mac had redeemed himself.

Such beauty, he thought, was too perfect to have come about by mere chance.

Joyful and grateful in the midst of slow dying, the two men bathed in that day until sunset brought it, and their time in the doldrums, to an end.

In his head, he could roam anywhere, and he found that his mind was quick and clear, his imagination unfettered and supple.

Louie watched the sky, whispering that it looked like a pearl.

He sat under the singers, listening to their voices, memorizing the melody, until they faded away.

The ocean stretched out in all directions in glossy smoothness, regarding the sky and reflecting its image in crystalline perfection.

They knelt over the body and said aloud all of the good things they knew of Mac, laughing a little at his penchant for mess hall pie.

"They feared that any second, they’d be flung into a reef."

"They could see more islands now."

"It was his first food in eight days."

"In time, the boat drew up to a large island."

"Treat them gently."

"Slipping between cool, clean sheets, their stomachs full, their sores soothed, they were deeply grateful to have been received with such compassion."

"The castaways had expected that if they ever saw land, they’d be rapturous."

"Knowing that if they were thrown loose, they’d never get back in."

"Each man asked the other if he was okay."

"All I see, he thought, is a dead body breathing."

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.

Without dignity, identity is erased.

In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live.

The crash of Green Hornet had left Louie and Phil in the most desperate physical extremity, without food, water, or shelter.

Degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.

A friendship was born.

His kindness was lifesaving.

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

If the solution worked as hoped—improving their condition, they were told—it would be given to Japanese troops.

"No one knows you’re alive."

"They can kill you here."

"In this secret place, they could, and did, do anything they wanted to their captives."

"To be captured in war was intolerably shameful."

"My job... was to keep my nose on my face and keep from being disassembled."

"The men in Ofuna... didn’t have the rights that international law accorded POWs."

"Iron must be beaten while it’s hot; soldiers must be beaten while they’re fresh."

"What followed was a strange and stilted conversation..."

"The only hope lay in the Allies rescuing them..."

"Survival was an open question, and deaths were common."

In time, Louie discovered that both the forced silence of Ofuna and the bowing submission of its captives were illusions.

Louie had another, private act of rebellion.

He wanted to leave a testament to what he had endured, and who he had been.

Knowing that the Allies were winning was immensely inspiring, enabling men to go on a little longer.

Through such acts, dignity was preserved, and through dignity, life itself.

Louie and Harris befriended Frank Tinker, a dive-bomber pilot and opera singer who had been brought from Kwajalein.

The extra calories, he strengthened his legs, lifting his knees up and down as he walked the compound.

It had been worth it.

Louie’s triumph was in the subversion.

The defiance took on a life of its own.

To the family, Louie was among them still, spoken of in the present tense, as if he were just down the street, expected at any moment.

Their distress came not from grief but from the certainty that Louie was out there, in trouble, and they couldn’t reach him.

What the Zamperinis were experiencing wasn’t denial, and it wasn’t hope. It was belief.

“We just have to keep on hoping.”

The notice was just a piece of paper. "None of us believed it. None of us."

Inside themselves, the Zamperinis still felt that persistent little echo of Louie, the sense that he was still in the world somewhere.

Until it was gone, they would go on believing that he was alive.

Louise penned a letter to Major General Willis Hale, begging him not to give up searching; Louie, she wrote, was alive.

Sylvia spent a lot of time in church, praying for Louie and Harvey.

Though the Phillipses didn’t know it, the medals arrived the same week Allen was captured.

If it has wings,” Tinker replied.

Every day, the men were slapped, kicked, beaten, humiliated, and driven through forced exercises.

For the captives, every day was lived with the knowledge that it could be their last.

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.

As the date of escape neared, Louie was filled with what he called 'a fearful joy.'

Hope for Japan’s victory,” he said.

The idea of working around the guards was intimidating, but Louie had to eat.

While shaving the Weasel’s forehead, he let the blade stray a little low.

They discarded the plane idea in favor of escape by boat.

They studied the guards’ shifts, noting that there was a patch of time at night when only one guard watched the fence.

"Why you no look in my eye?"

"This man, thought Tinker, is a psychopath."

"He was a beautifully crafted man, a few years short of thirty."

"Louie steadied himself. He held his face taut as he raised his eyes to the corporal’s face."

"The only aspect of the Geneva Convention that the Japanese sometimes respected was the prohibition on forcing officers to work."

"To be an enlisted prisoner of war under the Japanese was to be a slave."

"He was absolutely the most sadistic man I ever met."

"He practiced judo on an appendectomy patient."

"He was showing his hand, terror for the men would soon follow."

"He was intent upon inflicting the same pain on the men under his power."

To any POW, sugar was a treasure of incalculable value.

After the first few days in camp, I looked for him like I was looking for a lion loose in the jungle.

For the POWs, they were no longer passive captives. They were soldiers again.

In a place predicated on degradation, stealing from the enemy won back the men’s dignity.

The “sugar barons” became the rich men of Omori, even hiring assistants to do their laundry.

Thanks to the thievery school, only two POWs died, one from a burst appendix.

The Bird tried to knock Louie down; Louie wobbled but wouldn’t fall.

Louie’s defiance was an intolerable, personal offense.

Louie became increasingly angry. His interior world lit up with rage, and he couldn’t hide it.

He sent Louie back to Tinker with a load of sugar, no charge.

"Oh God, God, an American plane!" someone shouted.

"It was not their Messiah, but ours."

"Not even bayonet prods could wipe the smiles from the POW faces now."

"Louie wasn’t smiling for long."

"There was compassion in this man."

"I am uninjured and in good health and can hardly wait until the day we are together again."

"The camp authorities are kind to me and I have no kick coming."

"It makes us very happy indeed to have performed this service for our prisoners and relatives."

"The plane had simply crossed over Tokyo, but everyone in Japan, captive and free, knew what it meant."

"You might pass the glad tidings along, Mrs. Zamperini, for we know all the lovers of the sport will be glad to hear this."

I’m still alive and healthy … Yes, and it’s a funny thing … I’ve heard and also saw with my own eyes that I’m washed-up that is I was reported to have died in combat.…

It’s certainly a sad world when a fellow can’t even be allowed to live, I mean when a fellow is killed off by a so-called ‘official report.”},{

Trust you’re all in good health and in the highest of spirits, not the kind that comes in bottles.

Giving his box to Harris was, Louie would say, the hardest and easiest thing he ever did.

Now that the Bird was gone, and Harris was here with Louie’s other friends, Louie wanted to stay.

He had awaited his fate with equanimity.

The view was electrifying.

Louie and the others filed into the barracks, waited for the guards to rush off to censure someone else, then stole out.

A few seconds later, the room was shaking.

The guards fixed their bayonets and ordered the POWs back inside.

It was as if a giant frosted cake were sitting in the town.

Louie’s legs folded, the snow reared up at him, and down he went.

The Bird announced that just as at Omori, he was in command, and that the men must obey.

Stacked against one wall were dozens of small boxes, some of which had broken open and spilled gray ash onto the floor.

Louie lay on his plank and tried to ready himself for what Naoetsu would bring.

Seeing the guards smoking American cigarettes, the POWs knew that the Red Cross was sending relief packages, but the prisoners got nothing.

The work was extraordinarily arduous and often dangerous, and shifts went on day and night.

The river ice gave way to flowing water, and houses emerged where only snow had been.

On the walk back to camp that evening, the prisoners absorbed a few swipes with a club, but their mood remained merry.

The men developed a system for stealing and processing salt.

The accomplishment of outwitting their slaveholders was nourishment enough.

Sickened and starving, his will a fraying wire, Louie had only the faint hope of the war’s end, and rescue, to keep him going.

"If the Americans were turning their efforts toward a lone steel mill in a place as obscure as Naoetsu, had the B-29s already destroyed the big strategic cities?"

"His hope was dimming."

"The Bird was so vicious at Mitsushima that the POW officers soon concluded that they had to kill him to save themselves."

"They knew that Japan’s air defenses had been gutted, and that the Americans were very close."

"It was clear to them that Japan had long ago lost this war."

"Japan, whose people deemed surrender shameful, appeared to be preparing to fight to the last man, woman, or child."

"The POWs knew it was a lie, surely designed to lure them into obeying an order to march that would... afford the Japs a wonderful opportunity to carry out the Japanese Government order to ‘Kill them all.’"

"The surrounding mountains were capped in snow in summer."

"The POW physician, Hubert Van Peenen, looked about him, considered their situation, and came to a conclusion: This is the place of our extermination."

"No one explained why the POWs had been taken so far from anywhere and anyone, to a place that appeared uninhabitable."

He cannot break me.

Something went on inside of me, I don’t know what it was.

Time ticked on, and still Louie remained in the same position, conscious and yet not, the beam over his head, his eyes on the Bird’s face, enduring long past when his strength should have given out.

Louie had held the beam aloft for thirty-seven minutes.

The rain was napalm.

He believed that he saw the POWs glaring murderously at him.

Louie could take no more.

At dawn the sirens went silent.

No one, he knew, would defend him, and that fact left him angry and panicked.

As the day’s first light walked over the Pacific, the plane rose toward its bombing altitude.

I’m free! I’m free! I’m free!

The war has come to a point of cessation.

Oh! The war is over!

They were fish in a barrel.

In his tired mind, two words were repeating themselves.

Louie lingered in his bunk, fading, praying.

The Bird had left camp.

When he gripped his leg, his fingers sank in.

Their fear of the guards, of the massacre they had so long awaited, was gone.

Something catastrophic had happened, but Japan had not given in.

The emperor has brought peace to the world.

We are officers and gentlemen, and we are to behave that way.

It’s wonderful to be Americans and free men.

Forgiveness coursed through all of the men at Naoetsu.

We could almost hear their cheers as we passed over the last time.

I felt perhaps we were the hand of Providence reaching out to those men.

There’s just one thing left to say... it’s wonderful to be Americans and free men.

The pallets didn’t stop falling.

Determined to leave this indecent place with dignity.

Louie raised his arm and waved the war good-bye.

“From now on, September 9 is going to be Mother’s Day to me, because that’s the day I learned for sure my boy was coming home to stay.”

“Those Japs couldn’t break him,” Anthony said. “My boy’s pretty tough, you know.”

“If I knew I had to go through those experiences again,” he finally said, “I’d kill myself.”

“He’s on the way home. He’s on the way home.”

“What do you think, Pop?” someone asked Louie’s father.

“I realized this was what had ended the war. It meant we didn’t have to go hungry any longer, or go without medical treatment.”

“It was beautiful. I know it’s not right to say it was beautiful, because it really wasn’t. But I believed the end probably justified the means.”

“I just thought I was empty and now I’m being filled.”

“He was free. Allen’s friends went downtown and bought newspapers, spread them out on someone’s living room floor, and spent the morning reading and crying.”

“I would give anything to be home with all of you, but I’m looking forward to the day—whenever it comes.”

“This, this little home,” he said, “was worth all of it.”

Louie was beginning to suffer bouts of suffocating anxiety.

“If you love me enough,” he wrote back, “I’ll have to forget it. How much can you love?”

“Take it off! Take it off! I can’t stand it!”

Everyone wanted him to tell his story.

He was beginning to suffer bouts of suffocating anxiety.

In critical ways, she was engaged to a stranger.

He was emerging from years in which the only constants were violence and loss.

Louie clung to the thought of her as if, at any moment, she might be torn from his hands.

Louie spoke not with anger or anguish but with bewilderment.

For these men, nothing was ever going to be the same.

They carried unspeakable memories of torture and humiliation.

The central struggle of postwar life was to restore their dignity.

Each man had to find his own path, according to his own history.

Some became almost feral with rage.

Their dignity had been obliterated, replaced with a pervasive sense of shame and worthlessness.

Coming home was an experience of profound, perilous aloneness.

Some retreated into brooding isolation or lost themselves in escapes.

The quest that had saved him as a kid was lost to him.

He could conceive of no other way to save himself.

"People say to control your mouth, or it brings evil; you should be careful of your speech."

"I wanted to cry out, 'That’s not fair!'"

"A newly discovered photograph of Watanabe had been copied and distributed, along with a report that described him as a man 'known to have perversions' who might be found 'wherever there are loose women.'"

"Every day, Watanabe listened to reports on fugitive war-crimes suspects."

"Perhaps the explanation was that his last name was similar to those of two vicious men…"

"I thought I should refrain from writing them, as my letter might make them to remind up the hard days…"

"In the fall of 1946, two bodies were found amid the hollows and spines of the mountain, a pistol lying with them."

"He was neither charged nor questioned. He wrote a plaintive letter asking authorities to investigate him so his name could be cleared."

"Cross my heart, I have not done anything wrong."

"As his fear of being discovered eased, he began enjoying himself."

He walked around every day with murder in his head.

He had become someone he didn’t recognize.

In seeking the Bird’s death to free himself, Louie had chained himself, once again, to his tyrant.

Now Louie was on top of the Bird, and the two thrashed.

He let go and leapt off Cynthia.

Appalled at himself, Louie went on bender after bender.

Cynthia called her father, and he sent her the money to go back to Miami Beach.

He had tripped and fallen on a flight of stairs while hurrying to school.

The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them.

Now Louie believed that only the Bird could restore him, by suffering and dying in the grip of his hands.

The sight of him brought as much fear as joy.

Perhaps she’d registered the same sensation that Louise Zamperini had felt when Louie was missing, a maternal murmur that told her that her son was still alive.

I will meet you in two years, he had said, if I am alive.

Louie was suddenly wide awake.

God works miracles one after another.

If you suffer, I’ll give you the grace to go forward.

What God asks of men is faith.

For the first time in five years, the Bird hadn’t come into his dreams.

He was not the worthless, broken, forsaken man that the Bird had striven to make of him.

That morning, he believed, he was a new creation.

Louie had come here not to avenge himself but to answer a question.

If he should ever see them again, would the peace that he had found prove resilient?

He could speak about and think of his captors, even the Bird, without bitterness.

The words washed over Louie.

But on an October night in Los Angeles, Louie had found, in Payton Jordan’s word, "daybreak."

The Bird was no longer his monster. He was only a man.

He felt something that he had never felt for his captor before.

With a shiver of amazement, he realized that it was compassion.

It was forgiveness, beautiful and effortless and complete.

For Louie Zamperini, the war was over.