John Hersey famous quotes

04-12-2025

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.
-- John Hersey

#Writing #Opportunity #Giving
Learning starts with failure; the first failure is the beginning of education.
-- John Hersey

#Firsts #Teach
The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?
-- John Hersey

#Spiritual #War #Giving
To be a writer is to sit down at one's desk in the chill portion of every day, and to write; not waiting for the little jet of the blue flame of genius to start from the breastbone - just plain going at it, in pain and delight. To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again, and once more, and over and over....
-- John Hersey

#Pain #Writing #Flames
The reality is that changes are coming... They must come. You must share in bringing them.
-- John Hersey

#Change #Reality #Share
There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.
-- John Hersey

#Book #Age #Tin
What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.
-- John Hersey

#Memories #War #Bombs
To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again and once more, and over and over.
-- John Hersey

#Writing #Type #Satisfied
Do not work primarily for money; do your duty to patients first and let the money follow; 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.
-- John Hersey

#Life Is Short #Firsts #Patient
It's a failure of national vision when you regard children as weapons, and talents as materials you can mine, assay, and fabricate for profit and defense.
-- John Hersey

#Children #Vision #Defense
The writer must not invent. The legend on the license must read: NONE OF THIS WAS MADE UP.
-- John Hersey

#Legends #Made
My two major faults are that I row too long and pick up too many women
-- John Hersey

#Two #Long #Faults
Events are less important than our responses to them.
-- John Hersey

#Important #Events #Response
At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.
-- John Hersey

#Girl #Morning #Past
The second stage set in ten or fifteen days after the bombing. Its first symptom was falling hair. Diarrhea and fever, which in some cases went as high as 106, came next.
-- John Hersey

#Falling In Love #Hair #Fever

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