Quotes from Winston Groom

The fact that I were too dumb to play college football did not seem to impress the United States Army none.

But let me tell you this: sometimes at night, when I look up at the stars, an see the whole sky jus laid out there, don't you think I ain't rememberin it all. I still got dreams like anybody else, an ever so often, I am thinkin about how things might of been. An then, all of a sudden, I'm forty, fifty, sixty years ole, you know?

Things is very primitive in the jungle - no place to shit, sleep on the ground like an animal, eat out of cans, no place to take a bath or nothing, clothes is all rotting off.

He unbutton his jacket an inside, on his shirt, is all his medals—Purple Heart, Silver Star—must of been ten or twelve of them. "They remind me of somethin," he said. "I'm not quite sure what—the war, of course, but that's jus a part of it. I have suffered a loss, Forrest, far greater than my legs. It's my spirit, my soul, if you will. There is only a blank there now—medals where my soul used to be.

I get a letter once a week from my mama. She say everything fine at home.. I write her back too, when I can, but what I'm gonna tell her that won't start her bawling again? So I just say we is having a nice time and everybody treating us fine.

Nobody ever went broke sayin' 'Good Mornin'' to folks.

Try not to screw up. This will satisfy a few people, and amaze everybody else.

By 1929 a handful of farsighted flight pioneers had concluded that "aviation could not progress until planes could fly safely day or night in almost any kind of weather." Foremost among these was Dr. Jimmy Doolittle, recently armed with a PhD in aeronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In

Not that the title of top American ace wasn't flattering. After all, Rickenbacker had shot down seven enemy planes in as many months. It was just that all of the former recipients of the honor had all been killed, and he could not help but ruminate over what he called "the unavoidable doom that had overtaken its previous holders." Rickenbacker

After a trip to Japan Mitchell famously predicted that the next war would be fought in the Pacific after a Japanese sneak attack on a Sunday morning in Hawaii. Eddie Rickenbacker, who had served as Mitchell's driver before becoming an ace combat pilot, wryly quipped that "the only people who paid any attention to him were the Japanese." Most

But as Lindbergh's friend former president Herbert Hoover instructed, "When you had been in politics long enough, you learned not to say things just because they are true."21

The year that Hitler came into power the prestigious Oxford Union, a student debating society, overwhelmingly approved a motion stating that "this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country," and within a short period similar resolutions were adopted by most of England's other colleges and universities. When

He also had five 18-pounder siege guns as well as the dangerous rifled Whitworth gun that could crack a level shot a mile and more with terrifying accuracy.

Well, maybe it works for you, Forrest. I thought it was working for me too - but look at me. Just look at me," he say. "What good am I? I'm a goddamn legless freak. A bum. A drunkard. A thirty-five-year-old vagrant." "It could be worse," I says.

All my life, I ain't understand shit about what was going on. A thing just happen, then something else happen, then something else, an so on, and half the time nothing making any sense. But Dan say it is all part of a scheme of some sort, and the best way we can get along is figure out how we fit into the scheme, and then try to stick to our place. Somehow knowing this, things get a good bit clearer for me.

everything else is stripped away," the Colonel said, "that's all you will have left, your honor, the most important thing in a man's life.

The government had to choose between shame and war. They have chosen shame, and now they will get war.

There were a million British casualties in the first three months of the war.)

a twenty-knot streak looked like; if there weren't

The Midway battle was crucial. In exchange for 307 lives, the Yorktown and a destroyer, and 147 airplanes, the American fleet had destroyed four Japanese carriers, more than three hundred planes, a cruiser and a destroyer, and nearly five thousand Japanese sailors and airmen. It has been called, with justification, "the turning point" in the Pacific war.

by the end of the war American warplanes were dropping seventeen hundred tons of bombs a day on Japanese cities.

During one raid alone in 1945, using conventional bombs, it was estimated that eighty-eight thousand Japanese were killed and six square miles of Tokyo were completely destroyed. But

Such a Pretty, Pretty Girl

Churchill had lived by a simple dictum: "In war, resolution. In defeat, defiance. In victory, magnanimity. In peace, goodwill"—and he sincerely meant it.