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Book: Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War
Quotes of Book: Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of
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  1. William Manchester _ Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of

    have another drink, and then I learn, for the hundredth time, that you can't drown your troubles, not the real ones, because if they are real they can swim.
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  2. William Manchester _ Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of

    Henry V was naturally my idol, and here we skirt one of the central events of my life: my discovery of Shakespeare. I was now fifteen. For years I had been plagued by a vocabulary of words I could understand but not pronounce because I had never heard them spoken. "Anchor" had come out "an-chore," "colonel" as "ko-low-nall," and I had put the accent on the third syllable of "diáspora." But I could no longer ignore diacritical marks in dictionaries; Shakespeare cried to be read aloud. And as I did so I was stunned by his absolute mastery. In Johnson's secondhand bookstore in Springfield I found a forty-volume set of his works, with only Macbeth missing, for four dollars. I knew where I could get a Macbeth for a dime, so I paid a dollar to hold the set, and returned with the rest two months later. I have it yet, tattered and yellowing. It was the best bargain of my life. I
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  3. William Manchester _ Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of

    At Waterloo Pierre Cambronne commanded Napoleon's Imperial Guard. When all was lost, a British officer asked him to lay down his arms. Generations of schoolboys have been taught that he replied: "The Guard dies, but never surrenders." Actually he said: "Merde!" {"Shit!"} The French know this; a euphemism for merde is called "the word of Cambronne." Yet children are still told that he said what they know he did not say. So it was with me. I read Kipling, not Hemingway; Rupert Brooke, not Wilfred Owen; Gone with the Wind, not Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane. The"
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  4. William Manchester _ Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of

    Inside his second-rate mind, one felt, a third-rate mind was struggling toward the surface.
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  5. William Manchester _ Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of

    A man is all the people he has been. Some recollections never die. They lie in one's subconscious, squirreled away, biding their time."
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