Denise Kiernan · 373 pages
Rating: (19.2K votes)
“They fought to smile through the lines and the mud and the long hours, dancing under the stars and under the watchful eyes of their government, an Orwellian backdrop for a Rockwellian world.”
― Denise Kiernan, quote from The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II
“Case in point: On one of their first dates, he brought her a box of Ivory Flakes soap. Who needs flowers? Roses fade, but flaky soap available from the PX lasted months. Having Ivory Flakes was a rarity in itself, and also saved her valuable time—one less line to stand in, only to find that the grocer was out. Again. That was romance, as far as Colleen was concerned. Maybe this guy was a keeper after all.”
― Denise Kiernan, quote from The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II
“I hope for some sort of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up perhaps there’ll be no reason for any of it. I hope not. But we are only termites on a planet and maybe when we forge too deeply into the planet there will be a reckoning—who knows?”
― Denise Kiernan, quote from The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II
“A dictator decrees,” she later wrote, “a president asks Congress for permission to organize.”
― Denise Kiernan, quote from The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II
“The "hillbilly" girls were generating more enriched Tubealloy per run than the PhDs had...The District Engineer understood perfectly. Those girls...had been trained like soldiers. Do what you're told. Don't ask why.”
― Denise Kiernan, quote from The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II
“Whether or not you agree with the outcome, the tremendous amount that the Manhattan Project accomplished in such a short amount of time–just under three years–is astonishing. It makes you wonder what other kinds of things could be accomplished with that kind of determination, effort, and financial and political support. What if the kind of money, manpower, and resources that went into the Manhattan Project went into the fight against hunger? Cancer? Homelessness?”
― Denise Kiernan, quote from The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II
“The more she thought about it, the more she realized: Oak Ridgers had kept the most amazing secret ever.”
― Denise Kiernan, quote from The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II
“On occasion, people who tried to write family members living at Site X by addressing the letters to “Oak Ridge” got those letters returned to sender with a note reading simply: “There is no such place as Oak Ridge, Tennessee.”
― Denise Kiernan, quote from The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II
“In 1942, a new secret came to this part of the world. The earth trembled and shook and made way for an unprecedented alliance of military, industrial, and scientific forces, forces that combined to create the most powerful and controversial weapon known to mankind. This weapon released the power present in the great unseen of the time, unleashing the energy of the basic unit of matter known as the atom. Author”
― Denise Kiernan, quote from The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II
“She deemed Fermi’s work inconclusive, and in late 1934, she published her views on Fermi’s findings in an article titled “Über Das Element 93” (On Element 93), in which she proposed an idea that seemed unrealistic”
― Denise Kiernan, quote from The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II
“seemed to know what was going on, not even the”
― Denise Kiernan, quote from The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II
“The most ambitious war project in military history rested squarely on the shoulders of tens of thousands of ordinary people, many of them young women.”
― Denise Kiernan, quote from The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II
Denise Kiernan
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“Here he was holding the clear proof of the existence of other skies, but at the same time without having to ascend beyond the celestial spheres, for he intuited many worlds in a piece of coral. Was there any need to calculate the number of forms which the atoms of the Universe could create--burning at the stake all those who said their number was not finite--when it sufficed to meditate for years on one of these marine objects to realize how the deviation of a single atom, whether willed by God or prompted by Chance, could generate inconceivable Milky Ways?”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Island of the Day Before
“I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back that I can feel, she said. I want to have a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I stroke her.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from In Our Time
“Hadrian reeked of death. It wasn’t the sort of stench others could smell or that water could wash, but it lingered on him like sweat-saturated pores after a long night of drinking.”
― Michael J. Sullivan, quote from The Crown Tower
“There is a strong disposition in youth, from which some individuals never escape, to suppose that everyone else is having a more enjoyable time than we are ourselves;”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement
“In a shipwreck, it is every drowning man for himself.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
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