Top 120 Laura Hillenbrand Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A lifetime of glory is worth a moment of pain. Louie thought: Let go.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

2. “Without dignity, identity is erased.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

3. “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.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

4. “Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

5. “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.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

6. “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.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

7. “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.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

8. “Louie, looking as battered as his plane, walked to Super Man. He leaned his head into one of the cannon holes and saw the severed right rudder cables, still spliced together as he had left them. He ran his fingers along the tears in Super Man’s skin. The plane had saved him and all but one of his crew. He would think of it as a dear friend.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

9. “This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

10. “I have vertigo. Vertigo makes it feel like the floor is pitching up and down. Things seem to be spinning. It’s like standing on the deck of a ship in really high seas.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

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

— Laura Hillenbrand

12. “For ‘Seabiscuit,’ I interviewed 100 people I never met.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

13. “But with nonfiction, the task is very straightforward: Do the research, tell the story.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

14. “You don’t throw a whole life away just because it’s banged up a little bit.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

15. “His conviction that everything happened for a reason, and would come to good, gave him laughing equanimity even in hard times.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

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

— Laura Hillenbrand

17. “Few societies treasured dignity, and feared humiliation, as did the Japanese, for whom a loss of honor could merit suicide. This is likely one of the reasons why Japanese soldiers in World War II debased their prisoners with such zeal, seeking to take from them that which was most painful and destructive to lose.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

18. “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.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

19. “All I see, he thought, is a dead body breathing.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

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

— Laura Hillenbrand

21. “Am I ever happy,” he wrote to Louie. “I have to go around with my shirt open so that I have enough room for my chest.” Louie.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

22. “Louie and Phil’s hope displaced their fear and inspired them to work toward their survival, and each success renewed their physical and emotional vigor. Mac’s resignation seemed to paralyze him, and the less he participated in their efforts to survive, the more he slipped. Though he did the least, as the days passed, it was he who faded the most. Louie and Phil’s optimism, and Mac’s hopelessness, were becoming self-fulfilling.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

23. “If you dig into it, it comes back to you. That’s the way war is.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

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

— Laura Hillenbrand

25. “I am actually in poor health due to chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction syndrome, and my ability to work is greatly diminished right now, so I have to get better before I can start another big project.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

26. “His body was worn and weathered, his skin scratched with lines mapping the miles of his life.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

27. “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.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

28. “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. The showers gave them just enough water to last a short while longer. If only a plane would come.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

29. “Fatigue is what we experience, but it is what a match is to an atomic bomb.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

30. “I am in an altogether new world now. I can think of nothing more wonderful. It is a real touch of all that heaven means.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

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

— Laura Hillenbrand

32. “In seeking the Bird’s death to free himself, Louie had chained himself, once again, to his tyrant. During the war, the Bird had been unwilling to let go of Louie; after the war, Louie was unable to let go of the Bird.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

33. “At a Japanese POW camp, this dead American was found near war’s end, still standing, at a sink at which he was trying to drink. American soldiers and guerrillas went behind enemy lines to rescue the men at this camp, but they were too late. They found the bodies of 150 POWs, starved to death.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

34. “You were afraid to look up because you felt your face might be seen from above.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

35. “He felt his consciousness slipping, his mind losing adhesion, until all he knew was a single thought: He cannot break me.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

36. “I was 8 years old when I went across the street from my house to a fair, and they always had a used book sale. For a quarter I bought a book called ‘Come On Seabiscuit.’ I loved that book. It stayed with me all those years.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

37. “The post-war nightmares caused my life to crumble, but thanks to a confrontation with God through the evangelist Billy Graham, I committed my life to Christ. Love replaced the hate I had for you. Christ said, “Forgive your enemies and pray for them.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

38. “My illness is excruciating and difficult to cope with. It takes over your entire life and causes more suffering than I can describe.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

39. “Life was cheap in war.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

40. “To expand his lung capacity, he ran to the public pool at Redondo Beach, dove to the bottom, grabbed the drain plug, and just floated there, hanging on a little longer each time. Eventually, he could stay underwater for three minutes and forty-five seconds. People kept jumping in to save him.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

41. “It is in times of superlative hardship that individuals live their epic adventures, stories that thrill, fascinate, inspire, and illuminate.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

42. “What mystified Louie was his escape from the wreckage. If he had passed out from the pressure, and the plane had continued to sink and the pressure to build, why had he woken again? And how had he been loosed from the wires while unconscious?”

— Laura Hillenbrand

43. “Only the Laundry Knew How Scared I Was.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

44. “His books were the closest thing he had to furniture and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

45. “I am disabled, so I can’t travel, and I have not been to any development meetings, but Gary and the others affiliated with the film keep me updated on everything.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

46. “At last, a door thumped open. A man rushed out and snapped to a halt, screaming “Keirei!” It was the Bird. Louie’s legs folded, the snow reared up at him, and down he went.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

47. “Louie, declared dead more than sixty years earlier, would outlive them all.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

48. “For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn’t do my homework so I could write.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

49. “Seabiscuit took to stomping and bellowing for food day and night. His moans rang off the barn walls and worked on everyone’s nerves, but no one gave in. “The whole ranch became centered on the job,” Howard said. “Even the pigs quit grunting at him and the chickens kept out of his way.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

50. “The next morning, Louie was taken to an airfield to be flown to Okinawa, where many POWs were being collected before being sent home. Seeing a table stacked with K rations, he began cramming the boxes under his shirt, brushing off an attendant who tried to assure him that he didn’t have to hoard them, as no one was going to starve him anymore. Looking extremely pregnant, Louie boarded the plane.”

— Laura Hillenbrand