Quotes from Laura Hillenbrand

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.

It was not a great presence but a great absence, a geometric ocean of darkness that seemed to swallow heaven itself.

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 the this war as a Nip prisoner can really know what it means to see 'Old Sammy' buzzing around over camp.

I'll be an easier subject than Seabiscuit, because I can talk." Louis Zamperini to Laura Hillenbrand.

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

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

His old riot of black hair was now a translucent scrim of white, but his blue eyes still threw sparks.

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.

Life was cheap in war.

If you dig into it, it comes back to you. That's the way war is.

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. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty.

I have to go around with my shirt open so that I have enough room for my chest.

I can't describe the feeling he gave me," Howard said later, "but somehow I knew he had what it takes. Tom and I realized that we had our worries and troubles ahead. 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.

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?

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.

Old Pops and I have got four good legs between us," he said. "Maybe that's enough.

His features, which would later settle into pleasant collaboration, was growing at different rates, giving him a curious face that seemed designed by committee.

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.

Green Hornet being loaded for its final flight. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

Sylvia kept writing to Louie, telling him of all they would do when he came home. "Darling, we will take the best of care for you," she wrote. "You shall be 'King Toots,'—anything your heart desires—(yes, even red heads and all).

Though the captives' resistance was dangerous, through such acts, dignity was preserved, and through dignity, life itself.

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.

A month earlier, twenty-six-year-old Zamperini had been one of the greatest runners in the world, expected by many to be the first to break the four-minute mile, one of the most celebrated barriers in sport. Now his Olympian's body had wasted to less than one hundred pounds and his famous legs could no longer lift him. Almost everyone outside of his family had given him up for dead.

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