Quotes from John Hersey

It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians.

The price one pays for having a kind man at one's elbow.

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time . . . the moment when the atomic bomb flashed over Hiroshima . . . .

A YEAR after the bomb was dropped, Miss Sasaki was a cripple; Mrs. Nakamura was destitute; Father Kleinsorge was back in the hospital; Dr. Sasaki was not capable of the work he once could do; Dr. Fujii had lost the thirty-room hospital it took him many years to acquire, and had no prospects of rebuilding it; Mr. Tanimoto's church had been ruined and he no longer had his exceptional vitality. The lives of these six people, who were among the luckiest in Hiroshima, would never be the same.

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

His memory, like the world's, was getting spotty.

A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one street-car instead of the next that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time none of them knew anything.

she looked like Vivien, the Lady of the Lake, only she was fat and her lake was dust, sand and dust, bones and dust and sand.

America is on its way into Europe. You can be as isolationist as you want to be, but there is a fact. Our armies are on their way in. Just as truly as Europe once invaded us, with wave after wave of immigrants, now we are invading Europe, with wave after wave of sons of immigrants.

The frequency of the warnings and the continued abstinence of Mr. B with respect to Hiroshima had made its citizens jittery; a rumor was going around that the Americans were saving something special for the city.

Cacopardo stepped back, and raised his hand in a Fascist salute. Then, as his aged memory functioned, the hand wavered over to his forehead, and the salute became military. And he said: "Cacopardo is sulphur and sulphur is Cacopardo.

Such clouds of dust had risen that there was a sort of twilight around.

The class of people to which Nakamura-san belonged came, therefore, to be called by a more neutral name, "hibakusha"—literally, "explosion-affected persons.

A writer is bound to have varying degrees of success, and I think that that is partly an issue of how central the burden of the story is to the author's psyche.

Yes, people of Hiroshima died manly in the atomic bombing, believing that it was for Emperor's sake.

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.

Under many houses, people screamed for help, but no one helped; in general, survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neighbors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery.

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

The first stage had been all over before the doctors even knew they were dealing with a new sickness; it was the direct reaction to the bombardment of the body, at the moment when the bomb went off, by neutrons, beta particles, and gamma rays.

It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians.

The final test of a work of art is not whether it has beauty, but whether it has power.

And, as if nature were protecting man against his own ingenuity, the reproductive processes were affected for a time; men became sterile, women had miscarriages, menstruation stopped.

My prevailing interest has been in the world as a whole, and in the place of a person in a larger setting than one defined by national boundaries.

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 plants intact; it had stimulated them.