Erik Larson Quotes & Sayings

Coordination' occurred with astonishing speed, even in sectors of life not directly targeted by specific laws, as Germans willingly placed themselves under the sway of Nazi rule, a phenomenon that became known as Selbtsgleichschaltung, or 'self-coordination.' Change came to Germany so quickly and across such a wide front that German citizens who left the country for business or travel returned to find everything around them altered, as if they were characters in a horror movie who come back to find that people who once were their friends, clients, patients, and customers have become different in ways hard to discern. — Erik Larson

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

It could be done, because it had to be done — Erik Larson

The smell of peace is abroad, the air is cold, the skies are brittle, and the leaves have finally fallen. I wear a pony coat with skin like watered silk and muff of lamb. My fingers lie in depths of warmth. I have a jacket of silver sequins and heavy bracelets of rich corals. I wear about my neck a triple thread-like chain of lapis lazulis and pearls. On my face is softness and content like a veil of golden moonlight. And I have never in all my lives been so lonely. — Erik Larson

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. — Erik Larson

We must keep in mind, I believe, that when Hitler says anything he for the moment convinces himself that it is true. He is basically sincere; but he is at the same time a fanatic. — Erik Larson

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

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. — Erik Larson

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

There began to appear before my romantic eyes ... a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape. — Erik Larson

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

I don't listen to music when I write, but I do turn on appropriate music when I read portions of my manuscripts back to myself - kind of like adding a soundtrack to help shape mood. — Erik Larson

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

Between the lights and the ever-present blue ghosts of the Columbian Guard, the fair achieved another milestone: For the first time Chicagoans could stroll at night in perfect safety. This alone began to draw an increased number of visitors, especially young couples locked in the rictus of Victorian courtship and needful of quiet dark places. — Erik Larson

Once built, the Montauk was so novel, so tall, it defied description by conventional means. No one knows who coined the term, but it fit, and the Montauk became the first building to be called a skyscraper. — Erik Larson

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

There is no place suitable to my kind of mentality, — Erik Larson

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

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

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

Off the southeast tip of Italy a young Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors. "So that's what war looks like!" von Trapp wrote in a later memoir. He told his chief officer, "We are like highway men, sneaking up on an unsuspecting ship in such a cowardly fashion." Fighting in a trench or aboard a torpedo boat would have been better, he said. "There you hear shooting, hear your comrades fall, you hear the wounded groaning - you become filled with rage and can shoot men in self defense or fear; at an assault you can even yell! But we! Simply cold-blooded to drown a mass of men in an ambush! — Erik Larson

New York's perennial attraction was shopping. — Erik Larson

there existed a widespread, if naive, belief that war of the kind that had convulsed Europe in past centuries had become obsolete - that the economies of nations were so closely connected with one another that even if a war were to begin, it would end quickly. Capital — Erik Larson

DODD REITERATED HIS COMMITMENT to objectivity and understanding in an August 12 letter to Roosevelt, in which he wrote that while he did not approve of Germany's treatment of Jews or Hitler's drive to restore the country's military power, "fundamentally, I believe a people has a right to govern itself and that other peoples must exercise patience even when cruelties and injustices are done. Give men a chance to try their schemes. — Erik Larson

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

In Minneapolis there had been only silence and the inevitable clumsy petitions of potato-fingered men looking for someone, anyone, to share the agony of their days. That — Erik Larson

The dedication had been anticipated nationwide. Francis J. Bellamy, an editor of Youth's Companion, thought it would be a fine thing if on that day all the schoolchildren of America, in unison, offered something to their nation. He composed a pledge that the Bureau of Education mailed to virtually every school. As originally worded, it began, I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands ... — Erik Larson

At a time when hundreds of men have been put to death without trial or any sort of evidence of guilt, and when the population literally trembles with fear, animals have rights guaranteed them which men and women cannot think of expecting. — Erik Larson

But Burnham also created an office culture that anticipated that of businesses that would not appear for another century. He installed a gym. During lunch hour employees played handball. Burnham gave fencing lessons. Root played impromptu recitals on a rented piano. "The office was full of a rush of work," Starrett said, "but the spirit of the place was delightfully free and easy and human in comparison with other offices I had worked in." Burnham — Erik Larson

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

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

In an article about the warning, the paper quoted Cunard's New York manager, Charles Sumner, as saying that in the danger zone "there is a general system of convoying British ships. The British Navy is responsible for all British ships, and especially for Cunarders." The Times reporter said, "Your speed, too, is a safeguard, is it not?" "Yes," Sumner replied; "as for submarines, I have no fear of them whatever. — Erik Larson

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

As Wilson mourned his wife, German forces in Belgium entered quiet towns and villages, took civilian hostages, and executed them to discourage resistances. In the town of Dinant, German soldiers shot 612 men, women, and children. The American press called such atrocities acts of "frightfulness," the word then used to describe what later generations would call terrorism. On August 25, German forces bean an assault on the Belgian city of Louvain, the "Oxford of Belgium," a university town that was home to an important library. Three days of shelling and murder left 209 civilians dead, 1,100 buildings incinerated, and the library destroyed, along with its 230,000 books, priceless manuscripts, and artifacts. The assault was deemed an affront to just to Belgium but to the world. Wilson, a past president of Princeton University, "felt deeply the destruction of Louvain," according to his friend, Colonel House; the president feared "the war would throw the world back three or four centuries. — Erik Larson

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

Beneath the stars the lake lay dark and sombre," Stead wrote, "but on its shores gleamed and glowed in golden radiance the ivory city, beautiful as a poet's dream, silent as a city of the dead. — Erik Larson

But the sound frightened Isaac. The thudding, he knew, was caused by great deep-ocean swells falling upon the beach. Most days the Gulf was as placid as a big lake, with surf that did not crash but rather wore itself away on the sand. The first swells had arrived Friday. Now the booming was louder and heavier, each concussion more profound. — Erik Larson

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

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

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

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

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

Murder was a fascination as always. — Erik Larson

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

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

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

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

She loved their funny stiff dancing, listening to their incomprehensible and guttural tongue, and watching their simple gestures, natural behavior and childlike eagerness for life. — Erik Larson

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

Stephen Gray to devise an experiment that for sheer inventive panache outstripped anything that had come before. He clothed a boy in heavy garments until his body was thoroughly insulated but left the boy's hands, head, and feet naked. Using nonconducting silk strings, he hung the boy in the air, then touched an electrified glass tube to his naked foot, thus causing a spark to rocket from his nose. — Erik Larson

He invested heavily in a company that bought perishable foods and shipped them in the latest refrigerated cars to far-off cities. It was a fine, forward-looking business. But the Pullman strike halted all train traffic through Chicago, and the perishable foods rotted in their train-cars. He was ruined. He was still young, however, and still Bloom. He used his remaining funds to buy two expensive suits, on the theory that whatever he did next, he had to look convincing. "But one thing was quite clear ... " he 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." Bloom went on to become a congressman and one of the crafters of the charter that founded the United Nations. — Erik Larson

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

It was like watching a dear friend go insane. — Erik Larson

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

It was this big talk, not the persistent southwesterly breeze, that had prompted New York editor Charles Anderson Dana to nickname Chicago the Windy City. — Erik Larson

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

had become friends and met often — Erik Larson

In losing her he lost not merely his main source of companionship but also his primary adviser, whose observations he had found so useful in helping shape his own thinking. — Erik Larson

ELSEWHERE in the city, a scheduled passenger named Alta Piper struggled through a restless night in her hotel room. She was the daughter of Leonora Piper, the famed spirit medium known universally as "Mrs. Piper," the only medium that William James, the pioneering Harvard psychologist and sometime psychic investigator, believed to be authentic. Alta seemed to share her mother's gift, for throughout that Friday night, as she claimed later, she heard a voice telling her, "If you get into your berth, you'll never get out. — Erik Larson

Our growing conviction that no thoroughly honorable business-man who is this side of dotage ever advertises for a lady stenographer who is a blonde, is good-looking, is quite alone in the city, or will transmit her photograph. All such advertisements upon their face bear the marks of vulgarity, nor do we regard it safe for any lady to answer such unseemly utterances. — Erik Larson

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

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

The president of the United States, Benjamin Harrison, attended its grand opening. — Erik Larson

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

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

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

It's a great privilege to be permitted to share any part of your thought and confidence. It puts me in spirits again and makes me feel as if my private life had been recreated. But, better than that, it makes me hope that I may be of some use to you, to lighten the days with whole-hearted sympathy and complete understanding. That will be a happiness indeed. — Erik Larson

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

Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow. In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black. — Erik Larson

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

Indeed, these are the great lingering questions of the Lusitania affair: Why, given all the information possessed by the Admiralty about U-20; given the Admiralty's past willingness to provide escorts to inbound ships or divert them away from trouble; given that the ship carried a vital cargo of rifle ammunition and artillery shells; given that Room 40's intelligence prompted the obsessive tracking and protection of the HMS Orion; given that U-20 had sunk three vessels in the Lusitania's path; given Cunard chairman Booth's panicked Friday morning visit to the navy's Queenstown office; given that the new and safer North Channel route was available; and given that passengers and crew alike had expected to be convoyed to Liverpool by the Royal Navy - the question remains, why was the ship left on its own, with a proven killer of men and ships dead ahead in its path? — Erik Larson

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

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

Of the four men in Preston Prichard's cabin, D-90, only one survived, his friend Arthur Gadsden. Prichard's body was never recovered, yet in the red volume that now contains the beautifully archived replies to Mrs. Prichard's letters there exists a surprisingly vivid sense of him, as though he resided still in the peripheral vision of the world. — Erik Larson

No one could bear the idea of the White City lying empty and desolate. A Cosmopolitan writer said, Better to have it vanish suddenly, in a blaze of glory, than fall into gradual disrepair and dilapidation. There is no more melancholy spectacle than a festal hall, the morning after the banquet, when the guests have departed and the lights are extinguished. — Erik Larson

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. — Erik Larson

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

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

German forces in Belgium entered quiet towns and villages, took civilian hostages, and executed them to discourage resistance. In the town of Dinant, German soldiers shot 612 men, women, and children. The American press called such atrocities acts of "frightfulness," the word then used to describe what later generations would call terrorism. On — Erik Larson

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

The most important effect of all this was to leave the determination as to which ships were to be spared, which to be sunk, to the discretion of individual U-boat commanders. Thus a lone submarine captain, typically a young man in his twenties or thirties, ambitious, driven to accumulate as much sunk tonnage as possible, far from his base and unable to make wireless contact with superiors, his vision limited to the small and distant view afforded by a periscope, now held the power to make a mistake that could change the outcome of the entire war. As — Erik Larson

He was known for throwing elaborate parties, known as "freak dinners" - perhaps most notably the "Gondola Party" he hosted in 1905 at the Savoy Hotel in London, where he filled the hotel's courtyard with water, dressed everyone in Venetian garb, and served dinner to guests aboard a giant gondola. Lest this be deemed insufficient, he arranged to have a birthday cake - five feet tall - brought in on the back of a baby elephant. — Erik Larson

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

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

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

Marconi recognized that with no revenue and no contracts and in the face of persistent skepticism, he needed more than ever to capture an ally of prominence and credibility. Through Fleming, however, Marconi also hoped to gain a benefit more tangible. His new idea, the feat he hoped would command the world's attention once and for all, would require more power and involve greater danger, physical and fiscal, than anything he had attempted before. When it came to high-power engineering, he knew, Fleming was the man to consult. UNLIKE LODGE OR KELVIN, Fleming was susceptible to flattery and needful of attention, as evidenced by the fact that upon receiving Marconi's telegram he made sure the London Times got a copy of it. The Times published it, as part of its coverage of Marconi's English Channel success. — Erik Larson

On March 30, 1890, an officer of the First National Bank placed a warning in the help-wanted section of the Chicago Tribune, to inform female stenographers of "our growing conviction that no thoroughly honorable business-man who is this side of dotage ever advertises for a lady stenographer who is a blonde, is good-looking, is quite alone in the city, or will transmit her photograph. All such advertisements upon their face bear the marks of vulgarity, nor do we regard it safe for any lady to answer such unseemly utterances." The — Erik Larson

As a homeopath, he knew the powers not just of ordinary opiates but also of poisons such as aconite, from the root of the plant monkshood; atropine, from belladonna (or deadly nightshade); and rhus toxin from poison ivy. In large doses each could prove fatal, but when administered in tiny amounts, typically in combination with other agents, such compounds could produce a useful palette of physical reactions that mimicked the symptoms of known diseases. — Erik Larson

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

My travels took me as far north as Thorsminde, Denmark (in February no less); as far south as Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia; as far west as the Hoover Library at Stanford University; and to various points east, including the always amazing Library of Congress and the U.S. National Archives, and equally enticing archives in London, Liverpool, and Cambridge. — Erik Larson

On Monday, May 10, the coroner's jury issued its finding: that the submarine's officers and crew and the emperor of Germany had committed "willful and wholesale murder." Half an hour later a message arrived from the Admiralty, ordering Horgan to block Turner from testifying. Horgan wrote, "That august body were however as belated on this occasion as they had been in protecting the Lusitania against attack. — Erik Larson

Such peaceful intervals never lasted long. — Erik Larson

camp: "If they should at any time attempt, even in a small way, to move from their criticism to a new act of perjury, they can be sure that what confronts them today is not the cowardly and corrupt bourgeoisie of 1918 but the fist of the entire people. It is the fist of the nation that is clenched and will smash down anyone who dares to undertake even the slightest attempt at sabotage." Goebbels acted immediately — Erik Larson

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

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

Once again no one in the U.S. government had made any public statement either supporting the trial or criticizing the Hitler regime. The question remained: what was everyone afraid of? — Erik Larson

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. — Erik Larson

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

Neurath asked Dodd whether the United States "did not have a Jewish problem" of its own. "You know, of course," Dodd said, "that we have had difficulty now and then in the United States with Jews who had gotten too much of a hold on certain departments of intellectual and business life." He added that some of his peers in Washington had told him confidentially that "they appreciated the difficulties of the Germans in this respect but that they did not for a moment agree with the method of solving the problem which so often ran into utter ruthlessness. — Erik Larson

Wasplike with their long slender hulls, these were ships not seen in these waters before. They approached in a line, each flying a large American flag. To the hundreds of onlookers by now gathered on shore, many also carrying American flags, it would be a sight they would never forget and into which they read great meaning. These were the descendants of the colonials returning now at Britain's hour of need ... — Erik Larson