Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand, is a survival story about Louis “Louie” Zamperini.
Louie was an Olympic runner and an aviator in World War II.
Louie survived being lost at sea to face brutal abuse as a prisoner of war in Japan.
Mutsuhiro “The Bird” Watanabe was a corporal of discipline at Louie’s POW camp, especially cruel to him.
Years after being liberated, Louie must forgive “The Bird” to finally be free.
Unbroken Quotes With Page Numbers
“ALL HE COULD SEE, IN EVERY DIRECTION, WAS WATER. It was June 23, 1943. Somewhere on the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean, Army Air Forces bombardier and Olympic runner Louie Zamperini lay across a small raft, drifting westward. Slumped alongside him was a sergeant, one of his plane’s gunners. On a separate raft, tethered to the first, lay another crewman, a gash zigzagging across his forehead. Their bodies, burned by the sun and stained yellow from the raft dye, had winnowed down to skeletons. Sharks glided in lazy loops around them, dragging their backs along the rafts, waiting.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Preface, Page xvii
“It was not a great presence but a great absence, a geometric ocean of darkness that seemed to swallow heaven itself.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 1, Page 5
“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, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 1, Page 8
“Louie’s mother, Louise, took a different tack. Louie was a copy of herself, right down to the vivid blue eyes. When pushed, she shoved; sold a bad cut of meat, she’d march down to the butcher, frying pan in hand. Loving mischief, she spread icing over a cardboard box and presented it as a birthday cake to a neighbor, who promptly got the knife stuck. When Pete told her he’d drink his castor oil if she gave him an empty candy box. “You only asked for the box, honey,” she said with a smile. “That’s all I got.” And she understood Louie’s restiveness. One Halloween, she dressed as a boy and raced around town trick-or-treating with Louie and Pete. A gang of kids, thinking she was one of the local toughs, tackled her and tried to steal her pants. Little Louise Zamperini, mother of four, was deep in the melee when the cops picked her up for brawling.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 1, Page 10
“I have to go around with my shirt open so that I have enough room for my chest.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 3, Page 28
“The buses drove to the Olympic stadium. Entering in a parade of nations and standing at attention, 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. Louie stayed at attention, shaking with laughter.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 4, Page 33
“A lifetime of glory is worth a moment of pain. Louie thought: Let go.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 4, Page 35
“People had long conversations with him, only to realize later that he hadn’t spoken.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 6, Page 60
“Only the laundry knew how scared I was.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 8, Page 86
“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, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 8, Page 87
“Life was cheap in war.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 8, Page 87
“You were afraid to look up because you felt your face might be seen from above.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 10, Page 112
“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.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 13, Page 142
“If you dig into it, it comes back to you. That’s the way war is.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 13, Page 146
“some men may be wired for optimism, others for doubt.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Chapter 14, Page 154
“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 faded the most. Louie and Phil’s optimism, and Mac’s hopelessness, were becoming self-fulfilling.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 14, Page 155
“Louie was furious at the sharks. He had thought that they had an understanding:The men would stay out of the sharks’ turf – the water – and the sharks would stay off of theirs – the raft. That the sharks had taken shots at him when he had gone overboard, and when the raft had been mostly submerged after the strafing, had seemed fair enough. But their attempt to poach men from their reinflated raft struck Louie as dirty pool. He stewed all night, scowled hatefully at the sharks all day, and eventually made a decision. if the sharks were going to try to eat him, he was going to try to eat them.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 16, Page 168
“Such beauty, he thought, was too perfect to have come about by mere chance. That day in the center of the Pacific was, to him, a gift crafted deliberately, compassionately, for him and Phil. Joyful and grateful in the midst of slow dying, the two men bathed in that day until sunset brought is, and their time in the doldrums, to an end.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 16, Page 173
“Louie found that the raft offered an unlikely intellectual refuge. He had never recognized how noisy the civilized world was. Here, drifting in almost total silence, with no scents other than the singed odor of the raft, no flavors on his tongue, nothing moving but the slow procession of shark fins, every vista empty save water and sky, his time unvaried and unbroken, his mind was freed of an encumbrance that civilization had imposed on it. In his head, he could roam anywhere, and he found that his mind was quick and clear, his imagination unfettered and supple. He could stay with a thought for hours, turning it about.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 16, Pages 173, 174
“All I see, he thought, is a dead body breathing.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Chapter 17, Page 182
“But on Kwajalein, the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else had been lost: dignity. 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, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 20, Page 188
“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. Men subjected to dehumanizing treatment experience profound wretchedness and loneliness and find that hope is almost impossible to retain. 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, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Chapter 20, Pages 188, 189
“Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 20, Page 189
“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, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 20, Page 189
“Without dignity, identity is erased.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 20, Page 189
“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, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 20, Page 189
“Though the captives’ resistance was dangerous, through such acts, dignity was preserved, and through dignity, life itself.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 20, Page 212
“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, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Chapter 25, Page 257
“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, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 26, Page 272
“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, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Chapter 29, Page 290
“Wonderful?” wrote J.O. Young in his diary. “To stand cheering, crying, waving your hat and acting like a damn fool in general. No one who has spent all but 16 days of this war as a Nip prisoner can really know what it means to see ‘Old Sammy’ buzzing around over camp.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 32, Page 317
“Japan held some 132,000 POWs from America, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Holland, and Australia. Of those, nearly 36,000 died, more than one in every four.*1 Americans fared particularly badly; of the 34,648 Americans held by Japan, 12,935—more than 37 percent—died.*2 By comparison, only 1 percent of Americans held by the Nazis and Italians died. Japan murdered thousands of POWs on death marches, and worked thousands of others to death in slavery, including some 16,000 POWs who died alongside as many as 100,000 Asian laborers forced to build the Burma-Siam Railway. Thousands of other POWs were beaten, burned, stabbed, or clubbed to death, shot, beheaded, killed during medical experiments, or eaten alive in ritual acts of cannibalism. And as a result of being fed grossly inadequate and befouled food and water, thousands more died of starvation and easily preventable diseases. Of the 2,500 POWs at Borneo’s Sandakan camp, only 6, all escapees, made it to September 1945 alive. Left out of the numbing statistics are untold numbers of men who were captured and killed on the spot or dragged to places like Kwajalein, to be murdered without the world ever learning their fate.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Chapter 32, Pages 320-322
“Then, together, they passed through the camp gate and marched up the road, toward wives and sweethearts and children and Mom and Dad and home.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 32, Page 325
“If I knew I had to go through those experiences again,” he finally said, “I’d kill myself.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 32, Page 328
“I just thought I was empty and now I’m being filled…and I just wanted to keep being filled.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 32, Page 334
“She dressed in bohemian clothes, penned novels, panted, and yearned to roam forgotten corners of the world. She was habitually defiant and fearless, and when she felt controlled, as she often did, she could be irresistibly willfull. Mostly, she was bored silly by the vanilla sort boys who trailed her around, and by the stodgy set in Miami Beach.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 34, Page 348
“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, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 37, Page 373
“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 they make their tormentors suffer. 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, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 37, Page 373
“…resentment, the emotion that, Jane Amery would write, ‘nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past.’ ”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 37, Page 374
“Louie found himself thinking of the moment at which he had woken in the sinking hull of Green Hornet, the wires that had trapped him a moment earlier now, inexplicably, gone. And he remembered the Japanese bomber swooping over the rafts, riddling them with bullets, and yet not a single bullet had struck him, Phil, or Mac. He had fallen into unbearably cruel worlds, and yet he had borne them. When he turned these memories in his mind, the only explanation he could find was one in which the impossible was possible.
What God asks of men, said Graham, is faith. His invisibility is the truest test of that faith. To know who sees him, God makes himself unseen.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 38, Page 382
“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, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 38, Page 382
“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, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Chapter 38, Page 383
“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, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Chapter 38, Page 383
“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, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Epilogue, Page 386
“When Louie was in his sixties, he was still climbing Cahuenga Peak every week and running a mile in under six minutes.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Epilogue, Page 391
“His conviction that everything happened for a reason, and would come to good, gave him laughing equanimity even in hard times.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Epilogue, Page 392
“His body was worn and weathered, his skin scratched with lines mapping the miles of his life.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Epilogue, Page 405
“His old riot of black hair was now a translucent scrim of white, but his blue eyes still threw sparks.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Epilogue, Page 405
“I’ll be an easier subject than Seabiscuit, because I can talk.” Louis Zamperini to Laura Hillenbrand.”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Epilogue, Page 409
“Finally, I wish to remember the millions of Allied servicemen and prisoners of war who lived the story of the Second World War. Many of these men never came home; many others returned bearing emotional and physical scars that would stay with them for the rest of their lives. I come away from this book with the deepest appreciation for what these men endured, and what they scarified, for the good of humanity. It is to them that this book {Unbroken} is dedicated,”
~Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Epilogue, Page 416
Unbroken Summary
Unbroken is a best-selling non-fiction book by Laura Hillenbrand, published in 2010. It tells the story of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic athlete who fought in World War II.
After his plane crashes while on a search mission, Louis is left stranded in the ocean for 47 days before being rescued by a Japanese Navy ship and taken as a prisoner of war. Louis is tortured and brutal in several of Japan’s POW camps.
Despite his hardships, Louis survives and eventually returns to the United States. Unbroken is an inspiring story of courage and resilience in facing adversity.
It has won numerous awards, including the Christopher Award and the 2010 Nonfiction Prize from the Los Angeles Times.
The Best Book Quotes With Page Numbers
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