How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
He felt a sudden pressure, and then splinters and pieces of board and fragments of tile fell on him. He heard no roar. (Almost no one in Hiroshima recalls hearing any noise of the bomb…) (1.6)
Ugh, creepy. The story begins with the six subjects' memories of the explosion and their reactions immediately following it. In addition to the subjects' specific recall, Hersey draws attention to general "collective memory" of the blast in this moment.
Quote #2
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)
When Hersey wrote this part of the book roughly a year after the bombing, it sounds like the six subjects were still pretty haunted by memories of what had happened—and thoughts/musings about how the day could have gone differently, if things had just been different.
Quote #3
This especially upset Mrs. Nakamura, who remembered that in a moment of confusion on the morning of the explosion she had literally sunk her entire means of livelihood, her Sankoku sewing machine, in the small cement water tank in front of what was left of her house; now no one would be able to go and fish it out. (4.9)
Here, Mrs. Nakamura had just heard a rumor that people were going to be prevented from reentering downtown Hiroshima for a long time, which made her recall a really bizarre-o post-bomb moment in which she sank her sewing machine in her house's extra water supply in an effort to protect it from the attacks. We're never quite sure what her logic was there, and her memories don't make the reasoning much clearer… probably it's a little hard to think rationally when your city has just been blown up.