Tom Hanks Quotes

When I was in middle school, and teachers lectured about World War II, the conflict seemed impossibly distant and irrelevant. And it had only happened 15 years earlier.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories - not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.

Then somebody suggested I should write about the war, and I said I didn't know anything about the war. I did not understand anything about it. I didn't see how I could write it.

It became obvious to me that the generation who changed the world were my parents' generation, and not only in terms of the Second World War, but if you look at all the social legislation of the '60s - abortion, homosexual law reform, equal pay - it wasn't done by my generation; it was done by people who were adults.

I was a lieutenant in World War II.

After the war, in which I served as a pilot in the Air Force, I took up films.

My mom, Irmelin, taught me the value of life. Her own life was saved by my grandmother during World War II.

I was a senior high school student at the Far Eastern University when the war with Japan broke out in 1941.

There is a lot of evidence to back up the assertion that war fiction takes time. Many all-time classics of the genre, from Erich Maria Remarque's 'All Quiet on the Western Front' to Joseph Heller's 'Catch-22' to Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried,' took over a decade to pen.

I was in World War II; I cried when they took me in the Navy. That's the last time I cried.

There must be people who remember World War II and the Holocaust who can help us get out of this rut.

After each of my books about the war has appeared, I thought it might be the last, but I've stopped saying that to myself. There are just too many stories left to tell - in fact, more all the time.

In the Second World War, I was a little girl. I was evacuated in my country.

When I was a kid, my dad went to World War II. I didn't know him. I was born in '41.

I've been asked what differentiates war literature as a category, and I don't think there is anything.

Subsequently, the Japanese people experienced a variety of vicissitudes and were involved in international disputes, eventually, for the first time in their history, experiencing the horrors of modern warfare on their own soil during World War II.

How does the past ambush us? How can we be accurate about what happened, how can we be true to it? And can war be declared over? And can we ever evolve from the notion of war, of nations, of us versus them?

I once interviewed my grandma for a class project about the Second World War. After 70 years filled with marriage, children, grandchildren, death, poverty and triumph, the thing about which she was unquestionably the proudest and most excited was that she and her family did their part during the war.

I was born 20 years after World War II had ended, and people of my generation mostly thought of it as a terrible period portrayed in documentaries you'd seen, flickering, in black and white.

We had the great good fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war.

War is declared against Japan, German and Italy.

Not every Congressionally declared war will be remembered as a “good war”, but few if any Presidentially declared wars, if any, will ever be.

When the spring comes, we will manure the plains of Kosova with the bones of Serbs, for we Albanians have suffered too much to forget

The people who know war, those who have experienced it ... I believe are the most earnest advocates of peace in the world.

I spent two and a half years in the Philippines in World War II.