“Today the word "hero" has been diminished. confused with "celebrity." But in my father's generation the word meant something.
celebrities seek fame. They take actions to get attention. Most often, the actions they take have no particular moral content. Heroes are heroes because they have risked something to help others. Their actions involve courage. Often, those heroes have been indifferent to the public's attention. But at least, the hero could understand the focus of the emotion.”
― James D. Bradley, quote from Flags of Our Fathers
“When I asked him, fifty-three years after the event, "Mr. Lucas, why did you jump on those grenades?" he did not hesitate with his answer: "To save my buddies.”
― James D. Bradley, quote from Flags of Our Fathers
“The battle of Iwo Jima would quickly turn into a primitive contest of gladiators: Japanese gladiators fighting from caves and tunnels like the catacombs of the Colosseum, and American gladiators aboveground, exposed on all sides, using liquid gasoline to burn their opponents out of their lethal hiding places.
All of this on an island five and a half miles long and two miles wide. An area smaller than Doc Bradley's hometown of Antigo, but bearing ten times the humanity. A car driving sixty miles an hour could cover its length in five and a half minutes. For the slogging, dying Marines, it would take more than a month.”
― James D. Bradley, quote from Flags of Our Fathers
“This giant fleet of American warships – a modern armada – churns across the ocean day and night for a journey of four thousand miles. It moves with the inevitability of a railroad schedule. It stops for nothing, it deviates for nothing. The United States, having been surprised at Pearl Harbor and then raked in battle after battle by the onrushing forces of imperial Japan, has finally stabilized and gathered its strength. Now the American giant is fully awake and cold-eyed. It is stalking an ocean, rounding the curve of the earth, to crush its tormentor.”
― James D. Bradley, quote from Flags of Our Fathers
“That is how we always keep our beloved dead alive, isn’t it? By telling stories about them; true stories.”
― James D. Bradley, quote from Flags of Our Fathers
“Like a moth, Rene was attracted to the flame of fame”
― James D. Bradley, quote from Flags of Our Fathers
“Roughly fifty percent of procedure in a Marine basic-training program is about disconnecting the young American boy from his concept of himself as a unique individual, a lone operator.”
― James D. Bradley, quote from Flags of Our Fathers
“Later he would declare that “not getting hit was like running through rain and not getting wet.”
― James D. Bradley, quote from Flags of Our Fathers
“Iwo Jima had become the number-one front-page story in newspapers across the country. And it had become the most heavily covered, written-about battle in World War II.”
― James D. Bradley, quote from Flags of Our Fathers
“Celebrities seek fame. They take actions to get attention. Most often, the actions they take have no particular moral content.”
― James D. Bradley, quote from Flags of Our Fathers
“Late in his life, Rene complained of living a life of a celebrity one minute and a “John Doe” the next.”
― James D. Bradley, quote from Flags of Our Fathers
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without”
― James D. Bradley, quote from Flags of Our Fathers
“a road trip with her ex? danger ahead...”
― Lauren Barnholdt, quote from Two-Way Street
“Legend claimed Berserkers could move with such speed that they seemed invisible to the human eye until the moment they attacked. They possessed unnatural senses: the olfactory acuity of a wolf, the auditory sensitivity of a bat, the strength of twenty men, the penetrating eyesight of an eagle. The Berserkers had once been the most fearless and feared warriors ever to walk Scotland nearly seven hundred years ago. They had been Odin's elite Viking army. Legend claimed they could assume the shape of a wolf or a bear as easily as the shape of a man. And they were marked by a common feature-unholy blue eyes that glowed like banked coals.”
― Karen Marie Moning, quote from To Tame a Highland Warrior
“It can't rain all the time.”
― James O'Barr, quote from The Crow
“We often take vengeance long after the fact upon blameless surrogates, reprising the same sins of the ones who trespassed against us, and so perpetuate ad infinitum the pain we suffered at their hands.”
― Rick Yancey, quote from The Monstrumologist
“He lived within himself, nourished by his own substance, like some torpid creature which hibernates in caves. Solitude had reacted upon his brain like a narcotic. After having strained and enervated it, his mind had fallen victim to a sluggishness which annihilated his plans, broke his will power and invoked a cortège of vague reveries to which he passively submitted.
The confused medley of meditations on art and literature in which he had indulged since his isolation, as a dam to bar the current of old memories, had been rudely swept away, and the onrushing, irresistible wave crashed into the present and future, submerging everything beneath the blanket of the past, filling his mind with an immensity of sorrow, on whose surface floated, like futile wreckage, absurd trifles and dull episodes of his life.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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