#wwi

He had volunteered early, rather than waiting to be conscripted, for he felt a duty and an obligation to serve, and believed that ... being willing to fight for his country and the liberty it represented, would make some small difference. ... His idealism was one of the casualties of the carnage [of Verdun]. ↗

— Iain Pears

#war #wwi #dreams

A GI dreams about a long-haired dictionary because it always opens to the same page. ↗

— Edward R. Prisk

#dreams

I once asked an old Japanese man why Japan decided to team up with Germany during WWII, and do you know what he told me? Well, you would if you speak Japanese, which I don’t. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#germany #japanese #war #wwii #funny

All that technical expertise isn't worth a damn if you don't get the best out of people, though. . . . These were leaders who saw strength in ordinary people and showed them how to break tyranny. ↗

— Noël Coward

#wwii #leadership

Yet a part of you still believes you can fight and survive no matter what your mind knows. It's not so strange. Where there's still life, there's still hope. What happens is up to God. ↗

— Louis Zamperini

#god #survival #wwii #life

We love WWII because the cause was so obviously just, because you can't be a good person and say you wouldn't fight against an evil like that. It was so black and white on our side, and on our side so few died. (Our side meaning the lantern-jawed John Wayne Greatest Generation constantly canonized soldiers who strode in late to the graveyard that was Europe. Compared to Jewish, Russian, Roma, and other casualties, our losses were minimal.) We felt so strong. In some ways I think we're always trying to recapture that feeling of being a country of superheroes. With every war we invoke that one, we hope it will be that good. -from her blog ↗

— Catherynne M. Valente

#strong #superheroes #war #wwii #love

A very important man used to visit her sometimes, and I met him too. He loved children and used to dandle me on his knee. This was how the title came about for this book, Uncle Hitler, although in the old German tradition, I called him Uncle Adolf, even though I was not related to him. This was a sign of respect to an older person, which is why I called Frau Eva ‘Aunty Eva’. ↗

— Alfred Nestor

#alfred-nestor #eva-braun #hitler #second-world-war #uncle-hitler

When you go home Tell them of us, and say For your tomorrow, We gave our today. ↗

— Patrick O'Donnell

#joyce-shaughnessy-research #wwii #men

The official line is that, after the war, women couldn't wait to leave the offices and assembly lines and government agencies. But the real story was that the economy couldn't have men coming home without women going home, not unless it wanted a lot of unemployed vets. So the problem became unemployed women. "How you gonna keep us down on the farm after we've seen the world,"' she ad-libs to the old World War I tune. 'Enter the women's magazines, and cookbook publishers, and all these advertising agencies carrying on about the scourge of germs in the toilet bowl, and scuffs on the kitchen floor, and, my favorite, house B.O. Enter chicken hash that takes two and a half hours to prepare. I can just hear them sitting around the conference tables. 'That'll keep the gals out of trouble. ↗

— Ellen Feldman

#homemaking #wwii-fiction #home

I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting (WWI) to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls. ↗

— Paul Nash

#war #wwi #men