Quotes from Alan Gratz

Fear isn't a weakness. Anyone who's never been afraid is a fool.

And without a dream, without ambition, what point was there to living?

Little Mariano was at home, getting fat

No. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning," Lito said, looking up into the red-tinged clouds. "A storm is coming.

It was easy to think the worst of humanity when all I saw was brutality and selfishness, and these people showed me there was still good in the world, even if I rarely saw it.

we'd stood up to Hitler and the Nazis with the rest of the Allies.

We're a team," his dad repeated. "That's what we've always said. This is how we survive, right? Together. It's you and me against the world. But you shut me out on this one. And you let down the team.

Ichariba choodee," she said in Okinawan. It meant, "Now that we've met, we're family.

Head down, hoodie up, eyes on the ground. Be unimportant. Blend in.

What were they thinking, those little German children? Did they see animals when they looked at us, or people? I wasn't so sure myself anymore.

None of the boys were studying for the math test we had today, because none of them cared.

A girl from the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the girls' version of the Hitler Youth, came and collected him.

How do you explain to someone else why a thing matters to you if it doesn't matter to them? How can you put into words how a book slips inside of you and becomes a part of you so much that your life feels empty without it?

savaged him

Maybe Horst really believed all that "might makes right" malarkey. Maybe he didn't like an Irish boy showing up the German "master race." Or maybe he was just a bleeding maggot.

Moving forward was scary. Sometimes you made mistakes. Sometimes you took the wrong path. And sometimes, even when you took the right path, things could go wrong. But Reshmina realized that she wanted—needed—to keep moving forward, no matter what.

There were some horrors you couldn't fight and couldn't change. The real courage was just in enduring them.

It's not who you're fighting against that matters. It's what you're fighting for.

Remember: You are no one. You have no name. You do not speak, you do not look at them, you do not volunteer for anything. You work, bot not so hard they notice you. Gizela. Zytka. Your parents, Oskar and Mina. They are dead and gone now, Yanek, and we would grieve for them if we could. But we have only one purpose now: survive. Survive at all costs, Yanek. We cannot let these monsters tear us from the pages of the world.

Baseball, more than any other sport, has a magical way of connecting fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, grandparents and grandchildren and ancestors back down the line. - From The Brooklyn Nine

How you frame a photo says everything about the story you're trying to tell.

People didn't just hand you their secrets. You had to go hunting for them.

Germany surrendered. Hitler committed suicide. The Nazis are through.

Sergeant Meredith was the one who'd taught him how to survive. Sergeant Meredith was the one who'd given him his nickname. Sergeant Meredith was the one who had listened when Ray had argued for the Okinawans. Sergeant Meredith was the one who had taught Ray how to grieve for the death of a soldier.