How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition—a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything. (1.1)
In the opening paragraph, Hersey references the massive scale upon which the six subjects—and the residents of Hiroshima more generally, of course—experienced and had to confront death.
Quote #2
Of a hundred and fifty doctors in the city, sixty-five were already dead and most of the rest were wounded. Of 1,789 nurses, 1,654 were dead or too badly hurt to work. In the biggest hospital, that of the Red Cross, only six doctors out of thirty were able to function, and only ten nurses out of more than two hundred. (2.19)
In addition to providing detail about the losses the six subjects suffered, Hersey inserts some of the citywide statistics that really drive home the scale of the tragedy. Here, we get details about the impact on medical professionals.
Quote #3
When Mr. Tanimoto, with his basin still in his hand, reached the park, it was very crowded, and to distinguish the living from the dead was not easy, for most of the people lay still, with their eyes open. (2.47)
Mr. Tanimoto's memories of fetching water for the people in the park, unable to tell the living from the dead at times, is pretty grotesque and tragic.