Erik Larson Quotations

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.

Reading is such a personal thing to me. I'd much rather give someone a gift certificate to a bookstore, and let that person choose his or her own books.

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

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

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?

I pride myself on having a journalistic remove.

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

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.

I was never concretely aware of the extent of anti-Semitism in the United States and in the upper levels of the State Department.

Hitler was such an anomalous character - he was so over-the-top chaotic in his approach to statesmanship, his manner and in the violence which overwhelmed the country initially. I think diplomats around the world... felt like something like that simply would not be tolerated by the people of Germany.

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

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.

Now the city's most treasured landmarks are those that existed before the storm. The city has gone from one that looked forward to one that sees its happiest times in the past.

My job is to ... sort of guide them through the negative and positive energies in their life and erase the barriers and increase the strength so they can accomplish their goals.

He embodied the hubris that so marked the last turn of the century when America believed it could do whatever it wanted, wherever it wanted, and could even override nature.

There is a difference in what is focused upon, and the degree of disturbance that the person presents with,

Recovery had a lot to do with resolve and enthusiasm and the pace of rebuilding.

Maybe I'm imagining it, but I sense a deep seam of sorrow in Galveston for the way things have turned out. It was such a glittering little city in 1900, with the promise of becoming another San Francisco or New Orleans,

When I read that, ... I realized that maybe this guy was not quite the hero history has made him out to be.

If you can imagine walking out your back door -- and where you ordinarily see somebody's yard, kids playing and houses and the streets and all that stuff -- what you would most likely have seen is a pile in which your neighbors where at that very moment being incinerated,

The broader message is that technological hubris will always get you in trouble with nature.

There was this great sense of hubris that America and Galveston -- Galveston in particular --was going places, could do no wrong, ... Isaac's Storm.

His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Chicago has disappointed her enemies and astonished the world

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

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...

Germans grew reluctant to stay in communal ski lodges, fearing they might talk in their sleep. They postponed surgeries because of the lip-loosening effects of anesthetic. Dreams reflected the ambient anxiety. One German dreamed that an SA man came to his home and opened the door to his oven, which then repeated every negative remark the household had made against the government.

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

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

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

Place has always been important to me, and one thing today's Chicago exudes, as it did in 1893, is a sense of place. I fell in love with the city, the people I encountered, and above all the lake and its moods, which shift so readily from season to season, day to day, even hour to hour.

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