Top 100 Erik Larson Quotes

#1. If you had to jump six or seven feet or certainly drown, it's surprising how far even older people will jump.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #17257
#2. This is the story of Isaac and his time in America, the last turning of the centuries, when the hubris of men led them to believe they could disregard even nature itself.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #45214
#3. It had swept him, he said, "into a dream from which I did not recover for months.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #57771
#4. Her place already was luxurious, with a bowling alley where the pins were bottles of chilled champagne,

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #77385
#5. Camille's rain fell with such ferocity it was said to have filled the overhead nostrils of birds and drowned them from the trees.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #83000
#6. I will be on the look out for you, my dear girl," he wrote. "You must expect to give yourself up when you come." For this buttoned-up age, for Burnham, it was a letter that could have steamed itself open.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #91991
#7. New York's perennial attraction was shopping.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #110169
#8. Although her book did include compelling recipes for scrapple, ox cheek, and baked calf's head and tips for the preparation of raccoon, possum, snipe, plovers, and blackbirds (for blackbird pie) and "how to broil, fricassee, stew or fry a squirrel," it was much more than just a cookbook.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #110249
#9. It's a hindrance to be lonely and isolated in one's work. Ideas stimulate ideas, and the love of writing is contagious." Martha

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #111718
#10. He knew that his day was coming to an end. On July 4, 1909, as he stood with friends on the roof of the Reliance Building, looking out over the city he adored, he said, You'll see it lovely. I never will. But it WILL be lovely.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #136207
#11. He was a creature of the last turning of the centuries when sleep seemed to come more easily. Things were clear to him. He was loyal, a believer in dignity, honor, and effort.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #145441
#12. Expected, well suited to Germany's guerrilla

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #179186
#13. I found the actual notes that Prendergast sent to Alfred Trude. I saw how deeply the pencil dug into the paper.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #189360
#14. After noting that Germany's submarine campaign had sharply reduced traffic from America, Churchill told Runciman: For our part, we want the traffic - the more the better; and if some of it gets into trouble, better still.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #191536
#15. General Electric rather miraculously came back with a bid of $554,000. But Westinghouse, whose AC system was inherently cheaper and more efficient, bid $399,000. The exposition went with Westinghouse, and helped change the history of electricity.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #246386
#16. People seemed to believe that technology had stripped hurricanes of their power to kill. No hurricane expert endorsed this view.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #256370
#17. One portion of the lakefront, named Burnham Park in his honor, contains Soldier Field and the Field Museum, which he designed.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #294281
#18. The president of the United States, Benjamin Harrison, attended its grand opening.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #358276
#19. What I have now at your generous hands is infinitely precious to me. It would kill me to part with it, - I could not and I hope you could not. And I will be patient, patient without end, to see what, if anything, the future may have [in] store for me.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #365736
#20. I didn't believe all her stories," Martha wrote later. "I thought she was exaggerating and a bit hysterical." When Martha left her hotel she witnessed no violence, saw no one cowering in fear, felt no oppression.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #367911
#21. He knew not only WHAT to wear, but HOW to wear it.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #387883
#22. I went to Harvard for examination with two men not as well prepared as I. Both passed easily, and I flunked, having sat through two or three examinations without being able to write a word.' The same happened at Yale, Both schools turned him down. He never forgot it.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #394522
#23. Cherbourg was leaving Liverpool, the ship

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #426362
#24. Berliners came to practice what became known as "the German glance" - der deutsche Blick - a quick look in all directions when encountering a friend or acquaintance on the street.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #444308
#25. Perhaps, Herr Ditzen, it is less important where one lives than how one lives.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #444774
#26. I always thought a shipwreck was a well-organized affair, but I've learned the devil a lot in the last five minutes.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #449870
#27. Holmes was testing his power to bend the lives of people.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #475092
#28. In traveling about the city that day, Dodd was struck anew by the "extraordinary" German penchant for Christmas display. He saw Christmas trees everywhere, in every public square and every window. "One might think," he wrote, "the Germans believed in Jesus or practiced his teachings!

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #507317
#29. Yet by tracing the migration of guns, one comes readily and vividly to understand where the nation's current patchwork of gun controls have gone astray, and how easily they could be fixed to the increased satisfaction of gun owners and gun opponents alike.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #507970
#30. My prophetic task would be twofold: to stand up to him, and to stand by him. To awaken his conscience, and to salve the pain this would cause him.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #528243
#31. Following my between-books strategy of reading voraciously and promiscuously. What

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #552899
#32. We, of course, have the power of hindsight in our arsenal, but people living in Berlin in that era didn't. What would that have been like as this darkness fell over Germany?

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #553551
#33. Some captains made no attempt to save the lives of merchant seamen; others went so far as to tow lifeboats towards land. One u-boat commander sent the captain of a torpedoed ship three bottles of wine to ease the long row ashore.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #621090
#34. Stand with your back to the wind," he said, "and the barometer will be lower on your left than on your right.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #644457
#35. As I look back on those days, most people in Chicago felt that way. Chicago was host to the world at that time and we were part of it all.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #673369
#36. Dodd acknowledged Congress's reluctance to become entangled abroad but added, "I do, however, think facts count; even if we hate them.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #691881
#37. I find it all infinitely sad, but at the same time so entrancing, that I often feel as if it would be the part of wisdom to fly at once to the woods or mountains where one can always find peace. - Dora Root in a letter to Daniel Burnham

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #694038
#38. What Edith did not yet appreciate was that Wilson was now a man in love, and as White House usher Ike Hoover observed, Wilson was "no mean man in love-making when once the germ has found its resting place.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #700320
#39. gin daisy, which

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #739793
#40. The track lingered on the surface like a long pale scar. In maritime vernacular, this trail of fading disturbance, whether from ship or torpedo, was called a dead wake.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #762540
#41. Beside his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #773161
#42. MARTHA'S CHEERY VIEW of things was widely shared by outsiders visiting Germany and especially Berlin. The fact was that on most days in most neighborhoods the city looked and functioned as it always had.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #800297
#43. The ranks included a carpenter and furniture-maker named Elias Disney, who in coming years would tell many stories about the construction of this magical realm beside the lake. His son Walt would take note.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #802448
#44. During World War I, Germany had only 25 of its vaunted submarines sailing at any one time.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #830801
#45. I was born with the devil in me,' [Holmes] wrote. 'I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #838782
#46. He glanced back. Two images became impressed in his memory. One was of a collapsible lifeboat slipping from the ship, still sheathed in its protective cover; the other, of Captain Turner in full dress uniform still on the bridge as the Lusitania began its final dive.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #851213
#47. look as if they had been plucked from the Palace of Versailles or a Jacobean mansion - that you were aboard a ship being propelled far into the bluest reaches of the ocean.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #884015
#48. His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #969555
#49. Even the language used by Hitler and party officials was weirdly inverted. The term "fanatical" became a positive trait. Suddenly

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #971826
#50. Murder was a fascination as always.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1043982
#51. Reading Mission to Paris is like sipping a fine Chateau Margaux: Sublime!

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1115910
#52. Back in America, true to her nature if not to Boris, Martha met and promptly fell in love with a new man,

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1141617
#53. I was inclined to think him Jewish," she wrote; she "considered his animus to be prompted only by his racial self-consciousness.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1152988
#54. An artist, he paints with lakes and wooded slopes, with lawns and banks and forest-covered hills. - Daniel Burnham talking about Frederick Law Olmstead

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1153470
#55. Ferris, himself fed up with construction delays and Burnham's pestering, had told Gronau to turn the wheel or tear it off the tower.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1203244
#56. For the first time he began to wonder whether he should jettison his transatlantic dream and settle for something more quotidian, perhaps focus his company on ship-to-shore communication. There was

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1205878
#57. through the hull - the rush of water past a prow, the thrum of propellers.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1255578
#58. Torpedoes were expensive, and heavy. Each cost up to $ 5,000 - over $ 100,000 today - and weighed over three thousand pounds, twice the weight of a Ford Model T.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1258690
#59. He disliked the social obligations of the captaincy.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1265324
#60. For now, the tension was subtle, a vibration, like the inaudible cry of overstressed steel.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1266028
#61. There are no heroes here, at least not of the Schindler's List variety, but there are glimmers of heroism and people who behave with unexpected grace.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1294667
#62. The list of appetizers included stuffed eagles' eggs.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1294839
#63. Hitler's cabinet enacted a new law, to take effect January 1, 1934, called the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, which authorized the sterilization of individuals suffering various physical and mental handicaps.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1365289
#64. As the crowd thundered, a man eased up beside a thin, pale woman with a bent neck. In the next instant Jane Addams realized her purse was gone. The great fair had begun.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1381101
#65. On February 16, 1943, at 6:00 p.m., she was executed by guillotine. Her last words: "And I have loved Germany so.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1414589
#66. Whether out of professional pique or some instinct of fear, the ship's mascot - a cat named Dowie, after Captain Turner's predecessor - fled the ship that night, for points unknown.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1418080
#67. The Lusitania remained a passenger liner, but with the hull of a battleship.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1455863
#68. I sometimes feel," the president wrote, "that the world problems are getting worse instead of better. In our own country, however, in spite of sniping, 'chiseling' and growling by the extreme right and by the extreme left, we are actually putting people back to work and raising values.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1474239
#69. Within two months we will have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he'll squeak. It was possibly the greatest miscalculation of the twentieth century.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1476998
#70. (Britain had more than twice as many submarines as Germany but used them mainly for coastal defense, not to stop merchant ships.)

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1479631
#71. The most likely explanation is that there was indeed a plot, however imperfect, to endanger the Lusitania in order to involve the United States in the war.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1479738
#72. As it happened, their father had not had to spend very much time worrying. He had received telegrams from both sons, telling him each was looking for the other. The telegrams, Leslie later learned, had arrived five minutes apart, "so that father knew at home that we were both safe before we did.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1516920
#73. It was like watching a dear friend go insane.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1534019
#74. Dodd continued to hope that the murders would so outrage the German public that the regime would fall, but as the days passed he saw no evidence of any such outpouring of anger ...

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1557292
#75. Look here, old fellow, do you realize this has been the greatest meeting of artists since the fifteenth century?

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1567980
#76. Man plans, God laughs.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1595148
#77. During heavy rains, river water flowed in a greasy plume far out into Lake Michigan, to the towers that marked the intake pipes for the city's drinking water.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1599040
#78. The disaster had an important secondary effect: because two of the cruisers had stopped to help survivors of the initial attack and thus made themselves easy targets, the Admiralty issued orders forbidding large British warships from going to the aid of U-boat victims.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1606001
#79. Diels told the reporters, The value of the SA and the SS, seen from my viewpoint of inspector-general responsible for the suppression of subversive tendencies and activities, lies in the fact that they spread terror. That is a wholesome thing.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1614948
#80. I started reading the big histories and the small histories, the memoirs and so forth. At some point, I found the diary of William E. Dodd.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1650035
#81. Mowrer and his family made it safely to Tokyo. His wife, Lillian, recalled her great sorrow at having to leave Berlin. "Nowhere have I had such lovely friends as in Germany," she wrote. "Looking back on it all is like seeing someone you love go mad - and do horrible things.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1659571
#82. I had started with nothing, and if I now found myself with nothing, I was at least even. Actually, I was much better than even: I had had a wonderful time." Bloom

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1671289
#83. Among a list of measures effective for inducing vomiting, she included: Injections of tobacco into the anus through a pipe stem.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1673536
#84. But things were changing. Everywhere one looked the boundary between the moral and the wicked seemed to be degrading. Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued in favor of divorce. Clarence Darrow advocated free love. A young woman named Borden killed her parents.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1679774
#85. At the Quebec prison, he had read Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope, then had autographed the book and given it to a guard for a souvenir.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1683523
#86. There's something so relentless and foul about Hitler and his people, and the way things progressed from year to year. It just got to me in the strangest way.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1692246
#87. As the light began to fade, the architects lit the library's gas jets, which hissed like mildly perturbed cats.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1693359
#88. ONE MORNING IN AUGUST 1886, as heat rose from the streets with the intensity of a child's fever,

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1696822
#89. Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom that convulsed Germany and at last drove Roosevelt to issue a public condemnation. He told reporters he could scarcely believe that such a thing could occur in twentieth century civilization.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1729958
#90. Riders on the Ferris Wheel got the clearest, most horrific view of what happened next.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1741257
#91. There is no place suitable to my kind of mentality,

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1762302
#92. Later, a passenger reported seeing a woman giving birth in the water. The idea that this might have been his mother would haunt the boy for the rest of his life.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1770769
#93. It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root. This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1784811
#94. I thought I'd go to a bookstore and see what moved me.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1840311
#95. To remain silent is out of the question for a strong and honest man.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1850511
#96. But one thing was quite clear ... " [Sol Bloom, chief of the Midway] wrote. "[B]eing broke didn't disturb me in the least. I had started with nothing, and if I now found myself with nothing, I was at least even. Actually, I was much better than even: I had had a wonderful time.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1856278
#97. Tolerance means weakness," Eicke wrote in the introduction to his rules. "In the light of this conception, punishment will be mercilessly handed out whenever the interests of the fatherland warrant it.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1858171
#98. What most likely caused the second event was the rupture of a main steam line, carrying steam under extreme pressure. This was Turner's theory from the beginning.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1865145
#99. Oh, so many things swarmed in my thoughts," she wrote; "and yet each time I was with him I felt the charm of his presence.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1868669
#100. A battle followed, fought in true Gilded Age fashion with oblique snubs and poisonous courtesy.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson Quotes #1871472

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