Erik Larson quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Erik Larson

Erik Larson Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Erik Larson on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

Leaves hung in the stillness like hands of the newly dead.

There is no place suitable to my kind of mentality,

Dodd resigned himself to what he called the delicate work of watching and carefully doing nothing.

Riders on the Ferris Wheel got the clearest, most horrific view of what happened next.

gin daisy, which

As the light began to fade, the architects lit the library's gas jets, which hissed like mildly perturbed cats.

He signed the letter: George Washington Gale Ferris.

THE ADMIRALTY'S focus was elsewhere, on a different ship that it deemed far more valuable.

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood.
Daniel H. Burnham

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.

Even the language used by Hitler and party officials was weirdly inverted. The term "fanatical" became a positive trait. Suddenly

People seemed to believe that technology had stripped hurricanes of their power to kill. No hurricane expert endorsed this view.

With the physique of a bank safe, he was the embodiment of quiet strength.

Why in the midst of great events there always seems to be a family so misnamed is one of the imponderables of history.

Time lost can never be recovered ... and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.

Murder was a fascination as always.

One portion of the lakefront, named Burnham Park in his honor, contains Soldier Field and the Field Museum, which he designed.

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.

Her blind endorsement of Hitler's regime first faded to a kind of sympathetic skepticism, but as summer approached,

He disliked the social obligations of the captaincy.

The essence of war is violence and moderation in war is imbecility.
-Admiral Jacky Fisher of the British Navy

It was like watching a dear friend go insane.

Such peaceful intervals never lasted long.

The Lusitania remained a passenger liner, but with the hull of a battleship.

Stand with your back to the wind," he said, "and the barometer will be lower on your left than on your right.

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

Expected, well suited to Germany's guerrilla

Would be no skipping and dancing. No heathen. The exposition was a dream city, but it was Burnham's dream. Everywhere

He died angry," Chalmers said, "because I didn't believe him. Even in death he is emphatic and imperious.

Perhaps, Herr Ditzen, it is less important where one lives than how one lives.

Ned watched her. She was young and pretty - a "handsome blonde," as he later described her.

The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again.

(Cunard tickets did not identify babies by name, possibly out of quiet resentment that they traveled free.)

He became one of the few voices in U.S. government to warn of the true ambitions of Hitler

No system which implies control by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse.

I FIRST STARTED READING about the Lusitania on a whim, following my between-books strategy of reading voraciously and promiscuously.

Recalling his first impression of Hitler, Hanfstaengl wrote, Hitler looked like a suburban hairdresser on his day off.

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.

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

Turner, that day, was master of one of the great greyhounds of the North Atlantic - and looked the part.

At present," he said, "I am responsible for conveying my associates to a place called Chicago. I understand it is somewhere in the hinterland.

For now, the tension was subtle, a vibration, like the inaudible cry of overstressed steel.

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.

Following my between-books strategy of reading voraciously and promiscuously. What

As a reminder to himself and anyone who visited his office in the shanty, Burnham posted a sign over his desk bearing a single word: RUSH.

I found the actual notes that Prendergast sent to Alfred Trude. I saw how deeply the pencil dug into the paper.

The bureau had long banned the use of the word tornado because it induced panic, and panic brought criticism, something the bureau could ill afford.

Beside his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath.

The world, he said, must face the sad fact that in an age when international cooperation should be the keyword, nations are farther apart than ever.

A battle followed, fought in true Gilded Age fashion with oblique snubs and poisonous courtesy.

Her place already was luxurious, with a bowling alley where the pins were bottles of chilled champagne,

Man plans, God laughs.

This prolonging of a man's life doesn't interest me when he's done his work and has done it pretty well.

So every night," he said, "I slept with a torpedo and a puppy.

In an analogy that would prove all too apt, Max Weber likened the city to a human being with his skin removed.

She asked, what would he do if a lady happened to insist? Turner replied, Madam, do you think that would be a lady?

Whenever I finish a book, I start with a blank slate and never have ideas lined up.

Great murderers, like great men in other walks of activity, have blue eyes.

I thought I'd go to a bookstore and see what moved me.

Chicago has disappointed her enemies and astonished the world

I'm very perverse. If someone tells me I have to read a book, I'm instantly disinclined to do so.

There were always those passengers who came aboard bearing grudges against the modern age.

THE SUBMARINE as a weapon had come a long way by this time, certainly to the point where it killed its own crews only rarely.

It had swept him, he said, "into a dream from which I did not recover for months.

Why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow.

Reading Mission to Paris is like sipping a fine Chateau Margaux: Sublime!

Back in America, true to her nature if not to Boris, Martha met and promptly fell in love with a new man,

It's all right to drill your crew, but why not drill the passengers.

During World War I, Germany had only 25 of its vaunted submarines sailing at any one time.

They looked more like day laborers than seamen.

Ferris had created more than simply an engineering novelty. Like the inventors of the elevator, he had conjured an entirely new physical sensation.

He slashed her throat in a Van Gogh stroke that nearly removed her head from her spine.

His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.

No one cared what St. Louis thought, although the city got a wink for pluck.

Messersmith, in a dispatch, observed that even smart, well-traveled Germans will "sit and calmly tell you the most extraordinary fairy tales.

My between-books strategy was reading voraciously and on a whim.

They tasted a new snack called Cracker Jack and a new breakfast food called Shredded Wheat.

Cherbourg was leaving Liverpool, the ship

I like all kinds of music, though I tend to prefer jazz and classics.

New York's perennial attraction was shopping.

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

The list of appetizers included stuffed eagles' eggs.

Look here, old fellow, do you realize this has been the greatest meeting of artists since the fifteenth century?

ONE MORNING IN AUGUST 1886, as heat rose from the streets with the intensity of a child's fever,

In Calumet a thousand ornate streetlamps stood in a swamp, where they did nothing but ignite the fog and summon auras of mosquitoes.

Minneapolis was small, somnolent, and full of Swedish and Norwegian farmers as charming as cornstalks.

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

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.

He knew not only WHAT to wear, but HOW to wear it.

I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold.

U-boats in fact traveled underwater as little as possible, typically only in extreme weather or when attacking ships or dodging destroyers.

Among a list of measures effective for inducing vomiting, she included: Injections of tobacco into the anus through a pipe stem.

If I told you, you wouldn't know what I was talking about.

through the hull - the rush of water past a prow, the thrum of propellers.

As labor strife increased and the economy faltered, the general level of violence rose.

Holmes was testing his power to bend the lives of people.

Lost children filled every chair at the headquarters of the Columbian Guard; nineteen spent the night and were claimed by their parents the next day.

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.

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