Quotes from John Hersey

The doctors realized in retrospect that even though most of these dead had also suffered from burns and blast effects, they had absorbed enough radiation to kill them. The rays simply destroyed body cells - caused their nuclei to degenerate and broke their walls.

The reality is that changes are coming. ... They must come. You must share in bringing them.

I thought of God as being able to talk big and write *very* small.

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

All morning they watched for the plane which they thought would be looking for them. They cursed war in general and PTs in particular. At about ten o'clock the hulk heaved a moist sigh and turned turtle.

Many people who did not die right away came down with nausea, headache, diarrhea, malaise, and fever, which lasted several days. Doctors could not be certain whether some of these symptoms were the result of radiation or nervous shock.

What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.

It's a failure of national vision when you regard children as weapons, and talents as materials you can mine, assay, and fabricate for profit and defense.

Learning starts with failure; the first failure is the beginning of education.

The second stage set in ten or fifteen days after the bombing. Its first symptom was falling hair. Diarrhea and fever, which in some cases went as high as 106, came next.

The third stage was the reaction that came when the body struggled to compensate for its ills - when, for instance, the white count not only returned to normal but increased to much higher than normal levels.

Learning starts with failure the first failure is the beginning of education.

It's a failure of national vision when you regard children as weapons, and talents as materials you can mine, assay, and fabricate for profit and defense.

All morning they watched for the plane which they thought would be looking for them. They cursed war in general and PTs in particular. At about ten o'clock the hulk heaved a moist sigh and turned turtle.

Do not work primarily for money; do your duty to patients first and let the money follow; our life is short, we don't live twice; the whirlwind will pick up the leaves and spin them, but then it will drop them and they will form a pile.

There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?

Green pine trees, cranes and turtles ... You must tell a story of your hard times And laugh twice.

their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks.

It's a failure of national vision when you regard children as weapons, and talents as materials you can mine, assay, and fabricate for profit and defense.

Over everything—up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks—was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city's bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of the plants intact; it had stimulated them.

As for the use of the bomb, she would say, "It was war and we had to expect it." And then she would add, "Shikata ga nai," a Japanese expression as common as, and corresponding to, the Russian word "nichevo": "It can't be helped. Oh, well. Too bad." Dr. Fujii said approximately the same thing about the use of the bomb to Father Kleinsorge one evening, in German: "Da ist nichts zu machen. There's nothing to be done about it.

Dr. Wyman preached a God I couldn't quite see in my mind, and certainly couldn't love. I dimly pictured some kind of Grandfather, who dealt out to bad people their awful "just deserts," which I thought must be poisoned food at the end of delicious meals.