William Manchester Quotations

Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity.

Japanese naval officers in dress whites are frequent guests at Pearl Harbor's officers' mess and are very polite. They always were. Except, of course, for that little interval there between 1941 and 1945.

I wondered vaguely if this was when it would end, whether I would pull up tonight's darkness like a quilt and be dead and at peace evermore.

An Edwardian lady in full dress was a wonder to behold, and her preparations for viewing were awesome.

As she sallied forth from her boudoir, you would never have guessed how quickly she could strip for action.

He was a great thundering paradox of a man.

Our Boeing 747 has been fleeing westward from darkened California, racing across the Pacific toward the sun, the incandescent eye of God, but slowly, three hours later than West Coast time, twilight gathers outside, veil upon lilac veil.

It would be inaccurate to say that Churchill and I conversed. Like Gladstone speaking to Victoria, he addressed me as though I were a one-man House of Commons. It was superb.

Abruptly the poker of memory stirs the ashes of recollection and uncovers a forgotten ember, still smoldering down there, still hot, still glowing, still red as red.

The destruction of Manila was one of the greatest tragedies of World War II. Of all the allied capitals only Warsaw suffered more.

And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity.

His [Gen. Douglas MacArthurs] twenty-two medals-thirteen of them for heroism-probably exceeded those of any other figure in American history. He seemed to seek death on battlefields.

I realized that the worst thing that could happen to me was about to happen to me.

It was his [Gen. Douglas MacArthur's] relationship with the administration In Washington which became poisoned by his egomania. Link upon link the bond between events on the battlefield and his own ruin was forged, and, as is essential in genuine tragedy, the gods used the victim himself to forge the links.

To the medieval mind the possibility of doubt did not exist.

I came to a dead stop and began major revisions. Sometimes these entailed the shredding of all existing manuscript for a fresh start - an inefficient way to write a book, though I found it exciting.

He [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] was a great thundering paradox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring and outrageous, arrogant and shy, the best of men and the worst of men, the most protean, most ridiculous, and most sublime.

I try to be as ruthless as possible. I ask myself of each sentence, "Is it clear? Is it true? Does it feel good?" And if it's not, then I rewrite it.

The colors of the underwater rock [are] as pale and delicate as those in the wardrobe of an 18th-century marchioness.

One strange feeling, which I remember clearly, was a powerful link with the slain, particularly those that had fallen within the past hour or two. There was so much death around that life seemed almost indecent. Some men's uniforms were soaked with gobs of blood. The ground was sodden with it. I killed, too.

It is true that despite occasional gleams of Churchillian eloquence he [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] usually spoke poorly. He was far more effective in conversations a deux. But those who dismiss him as shallow because his rhetoric was fustian err.

His [Gen. Douglas MacArthur's] own heroes were Lincoln and Washington, and in some ways he resembled them.

Actors who have tried to play Churchill and MacArthur have failed abysmally because each of those men was a great actor playing himself.

The coconut trees, lithe and graceful, crowd the beach like a minuet of slender elderly virgins adopting flippant poses.

A man's task is to find himself, and if he fails in this, it doesn't much matter what else he finds.

The sum of a million facts is not the truth.

He [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] never went to church, but he read the Bible every day and regarded himself as one of the world's two great defenders of Christendom. (The other was the pope.)

They fought on with a devotion which would puzzle the generation of the 1980s. More surprising, in many instances it would have baffled the men they themselves were before Pearl Harbor. Among MacArthur's ardent infantrymen were cooks, mechanics, pilots whose planes had been shot down, seamen whose ships had been sunk, and some civilian volunteers.

But there are no loners. No man lives in a void. His every act is conditioned by his time and his society.