Top 100 Laura Hillenbrand Quotes
#1. I will read anything by Laura Hillenbrand, Walter Isaacson, Barbara Kingsolver, John le Carre, John Grisham, Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, Anna Quindlen and Alice Walker.
Hillary Clinton
#2. I'll be an easier subject than Seabiscuit, because I can talk." Louis Zamperini to Laura Hillenbrand.
Laura Hillenbrand
#3. 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
#4. A fantastically huge, roiling cloud, glowing bluish gray, swaggered over the city. It was more than three miles tall. Below it Hiroshima was boiling.
Laura Hillenbrand
#6. If you dig into it, it comes back to you. That's the way war is.
Laura Hillenbrand
#7. The biggest problem has been exhaustion. I've spent about 6 of the last 14 years completely bedridden.
Laura Hillenbrand
#8. And at that point, I think my experience in covering the subject helped me. I think editors felt comfortable with the idea of me telling this story because I had demonstrated that I know this business pretty well.
Laura Hillenbrand
#9. He had a colorless translucence about him that made him seem as if he were in the earliest stages of progressive invisibility.
Laura Hillenbrand
#10. I lived for four years in the 1930s with these individuals and the only time that I wasn't thinking about dealing with physical suffering is when I was working on this book. I've never been more alive as when I worked on this book.
Laura Hillenbrand
#11. It only worked for a little while; the morning after I agreed to go with Universal, an article came out in the Hollywood trade papers, and the secret was out.
Laura Hillenbrand
#12. Charlie Tilghman, who flies a restored B-24 for the Commemorative Air Force, taught me about flying the Liberator.
Laura Hillenbrand
#13. Four more times the Japanese strafed them, sending Louie into the water to kick and punch at the sharks until the bomber had passed.
Laura Hillenbrand
#14. But with nonfiction, the task is very straightforward: Do the research, tell the story.
Laura Hillenbrand
#15. 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
#16. 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
#19. He felt his consciousness slipping, his mind losing adhesion, until all he knew was a single thought: He cannot break me.
Laura Hillenbrand
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. The athletes were treated to a thunderous show that culminated in the release of twenty thousand doves. As the birds circled in panicked confusion, cannons began firing, prompting the birds to relieve themselves over the athletes. With each report, the birds let fly.
Laura Hillenbrand
#25. I have to go around with my shirt open so that I have enough room for my chest.
Laura Hillenbrand
#27. 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
#28. I'm attracted to subjects who overcome tremendous suffering and learn to cope emotionally with it.
Laura Hillenbrand
#29. 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
#32. 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
#34. 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
#35. I've used a cellphone exactly twice. Things move on. The world changes. And I don't know it.
Laura Hillenbrand
#36. 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
#37. 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
#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
#40. What God asks of men, said [Billy] Graham, is faith. His invisibility is the truest test of that faith. To know who sees him, God makes himself unseen.
Laura Hillenbrand
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. This disease leaves people bedridden. I've gone through phases where I couldn't roll over in bed. I couldn't speak. To have it called 'fatigue' is a gross misnomer.
Laura Hillenbrand
#44. 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
#46. Maybe it was better to break a man's leg than to break his heart.
Laura Hillenbrand
#47. With arms shrunken to little more than bone and yellowed skin, the castaways waved and shouted,
Laura Hillenbrand
#48. 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
#49. 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. Softly, he wept.
Laura Hillenbrand
#50. You were afraid to look up because you felt your face might be seen from above.
Laura Hillenbrand
#52. 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
#53. Every morning, the Omori POWs were assembled and ordered to call out their number in Japanese. After November 1, 1944, the man assigned number twenty-nine would sing out "Niju ku!" at the top of his lungs.
Laura Hillenbrand
#54. Old Pops and I have got four good legs between us," he said. "Maybe that's enough.
Laura Hillenbrand
#55. I just thought I was empty and now I'm being filled ... and I just wanted to keep being filled.
Laura Hillenbrand
#56. In 1938 ... the year's #1 newsmaker was not FDR, Hitler, or Mussolini. Nor was it Lou Gehrig or Clark Gable. The subject of the most newspaper column inches in 1938 wasn't even a person. It was an undersized, crooked-legged racehorse named Seabiscuit.
Laura Hillenbrand
#57. 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
#58. It was not a great presence but a great absence, a geometric ocean of darkness that seemed to swallow heaven itself.
Laura Hillenbrand
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. They were alone on sixty-four million square miles of ocean. A month earlier,
Laura Hillenbrand
#62. A report issued by the AAF surgeon general suggests that in the Fifteenth Air Force, between November 1, 1943, and May 25, 1945, 70 percent of men listed as killed in action died in operational aircraft accidents, not as a result of enemy action.
Laura Hillenbrand
#63. 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
#64. If I knew I had to go through those experiences again," he finally said, "I'd kill myself.
Laura Hillenbrand
#66. We just sat there and watched the plane pass the island, and it never came back," he said. "I could see it on the radar. It makes you feel terrible. Life was cheap in war.
Laura Hillenbrand
#67. On July 13, Louise felt a wave of urgency. She penned a letter to Major General Willis Hale, commander of the Seventh Air Force. In it, she begged Hale not to give up searching; Louie, she wrote, was alive. Unbeknownst to Louise, on that same day, Louie was captured.
Laura Hillenbrand
#68. 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
#69. It is in times of superlative hardship that individuals live their epic adventures, stories that thrill, fascinate, inspire, and illuminate.
Laura Hillenbrand
#70. With secret delight, he began teaching Bad Eye catastrophically bad English. From that day forward, when asked, "How are you?," Bad Eye would smilingly reply, "What the fuck do you care?
Laura Hillenbrand
#71. As Halloran parachuted over Tokyo, the Zero that had shot him down sped toward him, and Halloran was certain that he was going to be strafed, as so many falling airmen were. But instead of firing, the pilot saluted him. After the war, Halloran and that pilot, Isamu Kashiide, became dear friends.
Laura Hillenbrand
#72. In September 1942, a B-17 crashed in the Pacific, stranding nine men on a raft. Within a few days, one had died and the rest had gone mad.
Laura Hillenbrand
#73. His old riot of black hair was now a translucent scrim of white, but his blue eyes still threw sparks.
Laura Hillenbrand
#74. People had long conversations with him, only to realize later that he hadn't spoken.
Laura Hillenbrand
#75. Though the captives' resistance was dangerous, through such acts, dignity was preserved, and through dignity, life itself.
Laura Hillenbrand
#76. Resentment, the emotion that, Jane Amery would write, 'nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past.'
Laura Hillenbrand
#77. In terms of writing about horses, I fell backwards into that. I was intent on getting a Ph.D., becoming a professor, and writing on history but I got sick 14 years ago when I was 19. Getting sick derailed that plan completely.
Laura Hillenbrand
#78. A lifetime of glory is worth a moment of pain. Louie thought: Let go.
Laura Hillenbrand
#79. Louie and Seabiscuit were both Californians and both on the sports pages in the 1930s. I was fascinated. When I learned about his World War II experiences, I thought, 'If this guy is still alive, I want to meet him.'
Laura Hillenbrand
#80. Fatigue is what we experience, but it is what a match is to an atomic bomb.
Laura Hillenbrand
#81. We figure he is the people's horse, and we propose to train him in the open.
Laura Hillenbrand
#82. 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
#84. His features, which would later settle into pleasant collaboration, was growing at different rates, giving him a curious face that seemed designed by committee.
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. I look at the film as an opportunity to see some bountifully creative minds do something that I could not do - tell the story with images. I can't wait to see what they do.
Laura Hillenbrand
#88. His body was worn and weathered, his skin scratched with lines mapping the miles of his life.
Laura Hillenbrand
#89. Let out of his stall with the two men standing by, Seabiscuit head-butted Howard. Smith made his case in four sentences: Get me that horse. He has real stuff in him. I can improve him. I'm positive
Laura Hillenbrand
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. Most people, when they hear the disease name, it's all they know about it. It sounds so mild. When I first was sick, for the first 10 years or so, I was dismissed. I was ridiculed and told I was lazy. It was a joke.
Laura Hillenbrand
#93. Books on horse racing subjects have never done well, and I am told that publishers had come to think of them as the literary version of box office poison.
Laura Hillenbrand
#94. 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
#95. His conviction that everything happened for a reason, and would come to good, gave him laughing equanimity even in hard times.
Laura Hillenbrand
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. Watanabe would later admit that in the beginning of his life in exile, he had pondered the question of whether or not he had committed any crime. In the end, he laid the blame not on himself but on "sinful, absurd, insane war." He saw himself as a victim.
Laura Hillenbrand
#99. The turret was shot with holes, and the floor was jingling with flakes of metal and turret motor.
Laura Hillenbrand
#100. 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
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