Top 120 Laura Hillenbrand Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Charlie Tilghman, who flies a restored B-24 for the Commemorative Air Force, taught me about flying the Liberator.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

52. “For these men, the central struggle of postwar life was to restore their dignity and find a way to see the world as something other than menacing blackness.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

53. “We figure he is the people’s horse, and we propose to train him in the open.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

54. “Louie felt profound peace. 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. He was not the worthless, broken, forsaken man that the Bird had striven to make of him. In a single, silent moment, his rage, his fear, his humiliation and helplessness, had fallen away. That morning, he believed, he was a new creation.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

55. “In the morning he rose to run again. 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. The restiveness, the self-consciousness, and the need to oppose disappeared. All he felt was peace.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

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

— Laura Hillenbrand

57. “I think authors can get into trouble viewing the subject matter as their turf.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

58. “The crash of Green Hornet had left Louie and Phil in the most desperate physical extremity, without food, water, or shelter. But on Kwajalein, the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else had been lost: dignity.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

59. “To pilot a racehorse is to ride a half-ton catapult. It is without question one of the most formidable feats in sport.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

60. “Zamperini looked toward his crewmates. They were too weak.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

61. “On Kwajalein, Louie and Phil leared a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler’s death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people. Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

62. “I identified in a very deep way with the individuals I was writing about because the theme that runs through this story is of extraordinary hardship and the will to overcome it.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

63. “In the distance, the bomber swung around and began flying at the rafts again. Louie hoped that the crew had realized the mistake and was returning to help them. Flying about two hundred feet over the water, the bomber raced at them, following a path slightly parallel to the rafts, so that its side passed into view. All three men saw it at once. Behind the wing, painted over the waist, was a red circle. The bomber was Japanese.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

64. “In 1943 in the Pacific Ocean Areas theater in which Phil’s crew served, for every plane lost in combat, some six planes were lost in accidents. Over time, combat took a greater toll, but combat losses never overtook noncombat losses.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

65. “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 racehorse, by virtue of his awesome physical gifts, freed the jockey from himself.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

66. “Honestly, I expected to get a cold reception because of my subject matter. But when editors took a look at the story I had to tell, and saw that this was not a parochial story at all, they really warmed to it.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

67. “People think I must have been turning cartwheels on the night I sealed the movie deal – which was only two days after sealing the book deal – but I was really quite terrified.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

68. “He stowed a bottle of a local rotgut called Five Island Gin – nicknamed Five Ulcer Gin – in radioman Harry Brooks’s gas mask holster. When an MP tapped Brooks’s hip to check for the mask, the bottle broke and left Brooks with a soggy leg. It was probably for the best. Louie noticed that when he drank the stuff, his chest hair spontaneously fell out. He later discovered that Five Island Gin was often used as paint thinner. After that, he stuck to beer.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

69. “Phil was a deeply religious man, carrying a faith instilled in him by his parents. “I had told Al several times before to always do his best as he knew how to do it,” Phil’s father once wrote, “and when things get beyond his skill and ability to ask the Lord to step in and help out.” Phil never spoke of his faith, but as he sang hymns over the ocean, conjuring up a protective God, perhaps rescue felt closer, despair more distant.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

70. “The biggest problem has been exhaustion. I’ve spent about 6 of the last 14 years completely bedridden.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

71. “From the moment that Watanabe locked eyes with Louie Zamperini, an officer, a famous Olympian, and a man for whom defiance was second nature, no man obsessed him more.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

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

— Laura Hillenbrand

73. “Having a lot of people suddenly depending on me to get the job done was a marvelous motivator. The book and movie deals seemed to flip a switch in my head, and off I went.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

74. “When Louie was in his sixties, he was still climbing Cahuenga Peak every week and running a mile in under six minutes.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

75. “I’ve used a cellphone exactly twice. Things move on. The world changes. And I don’t know it.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

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

— Laura Hillenbrand

77. “I’m attracted to subjects who overcome tremendous suffering and learn to cope emotionally with it.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

78. “Louie killed time by sleeping on Mitchell’s navigator table and taking flying lessons from Phil. On some flights, he sprawled behind the cockpit, reading Ellery Queen novels and taxing the nerves of Douglas, who eventually got so annoyed at having to step over Louie’s long legs that he attacked him with a fire extinguisher.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

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

— Laura Hillenbrand

80. “The turret was shot with holes, and the floor was jingling with flakes of metal and turret motor.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

81. “I got sick when I was 19, and I’d been a really healthy 19-year-old, so I don’t have a lot to compare it to. Does it feel like the pain after you give birth? I don’t know.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

82. “In keeping with the American effort to reconcile with Japan, all of them, including those serving life sentences, would soon be paroled. It appears that even Sueharu Kitamura, “the Quack,” was set free, in spite of his death sentence. By 1958, every war criminal who had not been executed would be free, and on December 30 of that year, all would be granted amnesty. Sugamo would be torn down, and the epic ordeals of POWs in Japan would fade from the world’s memory.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

83. “There’s more than one thing I can’t do and there are a lot more things than that that you can’t do or you wouldn’t be in the newspaper business. You’d be a jockey and a scholar and a connoisseur of femininity like I am.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

84. “I’ll be an easier subject than Seabiscuit, because I can talk.” Louis Zamperini to Laura Hillenbrand.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

85. “I have to detach myself completely from aspirations. I hardly ever listen to music anymore because it arouses all of this yearning in me.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

86. “He grasped for hope in Emerson’s vision of natural polarities, in which all things are balanced by their opposites – darkness by light, cold by heat, loss by gain.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

87. “There sat a twelve-foot-long, nine-thousand-pound bomb called Little Boy.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

88. “In Torrance, a one-boy insurgency was born.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

89. “My work was entirely nonfiction.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

90. “I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer’s creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

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

— Laura Hillenbrand

92. “Since signing with Universal, I have been working closely with Gary Ross, the director, producer and screenwriter. We have spent many hours on the phone, and I’ve been sending him information and items that have been useful to the writing process.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

93. “The autos alone remained to conquer space.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

94. “Pete urged Louie to enter the Compton Open and try his legs at a longer distance. “If you stay with Norman Bright,” he told Louie, “you make the Olympic team.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

95. “I spoke to my agent and learned that a Hollywood scout had seen my proposal in one of the publishing houses, and had faxed it to Hollywood, where it was generating a lot of interest.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

96. “My agent and I put out my proposal one Thursday afternoon in August, 1998. Publishers started bidding immediately, and that process progressed for a few days.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

97. “Louie came upon a reporter staring into a crater, in tears. Louie walked to him, bracing to see a dead body. Instead, he saw a typewriter, flattened.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

98. “According to his diary, he spent the journey introducing himself to every pretty girl he saw, including a total of five between Chicago and Ohio.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

99. “It remains a mystery why these three young men, veterans of the same training and the same crash, differed so radically in their perceptions of their plight. Maybe the difference was biological; some men may be wired for optimism, others for doubt. As a toddler, Louie had leapt from a train.”

— Laura Hillenbrand

100. “Blackout curtains were hung in windows across America, from solitary farmhouses to the White House.”

— Laura Hillenbrand