Laura Hillenbrand Quotes

This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind.

People think I must have been turning cartwheels on the night I sealed the movie deal - which was only two days after sealing the book deal - but I was really quite terrified.

I think authors can get into trouble viewing the subject matter as their turf

It's easy to talk to a horse if you understand his language. Horses stay the same from the day they are born until the day they die. They are only changed by the way people treat them.

The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer.

For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn't do my homework so I could write

Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live.

Without dignity, identity is erased.

I just thought I was empty and now I'm being filled...and I just wanted to keep being filled.

His books were the closest thing he had to furniture and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.

His conviction that everything happened for a reason, and would come to good, gave him laughing equanimity even in hard times.

A lifetime of glory is worth a moment of pain. Louie thought: Let go.

Fatigue is what we experience, but it is what a match is to an atomic bomb.

I'm attracted to subjects who overcome tremendous suffering and learn to cope emotionally with it

I am in an altogether new world now. I can think of nothing more wonderful. It is a real touch of all that heaven means.

... character reigns preeminent in determining potential.

When he thought of his history, what resonated with him now was not all that he had suffered but the divine love that he believed had intervened to save him.

But with nonfiction, the task is very straightforward: Do the research, tell the story

I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer's creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen

Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen.

I have vertigo. Vertigo makes it feel like the floor is pitching up and down. Things seem to be spinning. It's like standing on the deck of a ship in really high seas.

I identified in a very deep way with the individuals I was writing about because the theme that runs through this story is of extraordinary hardship and the will to overcome it.

My work was entirely nonfiction.

Books on horse racing subjects have never done well, and I am told that publishers had come to think of them as the literary version of box office poison

My agent and I put out my proposal one Thursday afternoon in August, 1998. Publishers started bidding immediately, and that process progressed for a few days.

What God asks of men, said [Billy] Graham, is faith. His invisibility is the truest test of that faith. To know who sees him, God makes himself unseen.

My illness is excruciating and difficult to cope with. It takes over your entire life and causes more suffering than I can describe.

Having a lot of people suddenly depending on me to get the job done was a marvelous motivator. The book and movie deals seemed to flip a switch in my head, and off I went

...maybe it was better to break a man's leg than to break his heart.

At that moment, something shifted sweetly inside him. It was forgiveness, beautiful and effortless and complete. For Louie Zamperini, the war was over.

I look at the film as an opportunity to see some bountifully creative minds do something that I could not do - tell the story with images. I can't wait to see what they do.

I got sick when I was 19, and I'd been a really healthy 19-year-old, so I don't have a lot to compare it to. Does it feel like the pain after you give birth? I don't know

We just sat there and watched the plane pass the island, and it never came back," he said. "I could see it on the radar. It makes you feel terrible. Life was cheap in war.

For 'Seabiscuit,' I interviewed 100 people I never met.

I have to detach myself completely from aspirations. I hardly ever listen to music anymore because it arouses all of this yearning in me

The biggest problem has been exhaustion. I've spent about 6 of the last 14 years completely bedridden.

I am disabled, so I can't travel, and I have not been to any development meetings, but Gary and the others affiliated with the film keep me updated on everything.

I spoke to my agent and learned that a Hollywood scout had seen my proposal in one of the publishing houses, and had faxed it to Hollywood, where it was generating a lot of interest

I've used a cellphone exactly twice. Things move on. The world changes. And I don't know it

I had been writing professionally since 1988

Though the captives' resistance was dangerous, through such acts, dignity was preserved, and through dignity, life itself.

A fantastically huge, roiling cloud, glowing bluish gray, swaggered over the city. It was more than three miles tall. Below it Hiroshima was boiling.

We just sat there and watched the plane pass the island, and it never came back, " he said. "I could see it on the radar. It makes you feel terrible. Life was cheap in war.