Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Goebbels was known for his wit; Martha, for a time, considered him charming. “Infectious and delightful, eyes sparkling, voice soft, his speech witty and light, it is difficult to remember his cruelty, his cunning destructive talents.” Her mother, Mattie, always enjoyed being seated next to Goebbels at banquets; Dodd considered him “one of the few men with a sense of humor in Germany.”

— Erik Larson

102. “I pride myself on having a journalistic remove.”

— Erik Larson

103. “Dodd listened intently as Hitler portrayed Germany as a well-meaning, peace-seeking nation whose modest desire for equality of armaments was being opposed by other nations. ‘It was not the address of a thinker,’ Dodd wrote in his diary, ’but of an emotionalist claiming that Germany had in no way been responsible for the World War and that she was the victim of wicked enemies.”

— Erik Larson

104. “At night thunderstorms arose often, shedding lightning that gave the terrain the pallor of a corpse. Fog would settle in for days, causing the edge of the cliff to look like the edge of the material world. At regular intervals the men heard the lost-calf moan of foghorns as steamships waited offshore for clarity.”

— Erik Larson

105. “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

106. “Lauriat made his first trip in 1873 on one of Cunard’s earliest steamers, the Atlas. His purchases routinely made news. One acquisition, of a Bible dating to 1599, a Geneva, or “Breeches,” Bible – so named because it used the word breeches to describe what Adam and Eve wore – drew nearly a full column in the New York Times.”

— Erik Larson

107. “If I told you, you wouldn’t know what I was talking about.”

— Erik Larson

108. “As long as there was tea, there was England.”

— Erik Larson

109. “It’s all right to drill your crew, but why not drill the passengers.”

— Erik Larson

110. “Reading Mission to Paris is like sipping a fine Chateau Margaux: Sublime!”

— Erik Larson

111. “To produce the kind of landscape effects Olmsted strived to create required not months but years, even decades. “I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future,” he wrote. “In laying out Central Park we determined to think of no result to be realized in less than forty years.”

— Erik Larson

112. “I never gave them courage,” he said. “I was able to focus theirs.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

114. “The city’s legions of working men disagreed. They always had counted Harrison as one of their own, “Our Carter,” even though he was a plantation-reared Kentucky man who had gone to Yale, spoke fluent French and German, and recited lengthy passages from Shakespeare.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

117. “We were still looking upon war in the light of Victorian and previous wars,” Morton wrote later, adding that he and his brother had failed to appreciate that the “nature and method of war had changed for all time in August 1914 and that no war in the future would exclude anybody, civilians, men, women or children.”

— Erik Larson

118. “But Zimmermann surprised him. On Friday, March 2, during a press conference, Zimmermann himself confirmed that he had sent the telegram. “By admitting the truth,” Lansing wrote, “he blundered in a most astounding manner for a man engaged in international intrigue. Of course the message itself was a stupid piece of business, but admitting it was far worse.”

— Erik Larson

119. “Families learned of the deaths of kin mostly by telegram, but some knew or sensed their loss even when no telegram brought the news. Husbands and wives had promised to write letters or send cables to announce their safe arrival, but these were never sent. Passengers who had arranged to stay with friends in England and Ireland never showed up. The worst were those situations where a passenger was expected to be on a different ship but for one reason or another had ended up on the Lusitania.”

— Erik Larson

120. “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

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

— Erik Larson

122. “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

123. “Koerver reports another example of delusional thinking within the German navy. Adm. Edouard von Capelle said, on Feb. 1, 1917, “From a military point of view I rate the effect of America coming on the side of our enemies as nil.” Tuchman, Zimmermann Telegram, 139; Koerver, German Submarine Warfare, xxxiii.”

— Erik Larson

124. “One of those who canceled citing illness was Lady Cosmo Duff-Gordon, a fashion designer who had survived the sinking of the Titanic. Another designer, Philip Mangone, canceled for unspecified reasons. Years later he would find himself aboard the airship Hindenburg, on its fatal last flight; he survived, albeit badly burned. Otherwise, the Lusitania was heavily booked, especially in the lesser classes.”

— Erik Larson

125. “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

126. “Cherbourg was leaving Liverpool, the ship.”

— Erik Larson

127. “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

128. “Its 300 stokers, trimmers, and firemen, working 100 per shift, would shovel 1,000 tons of coal a day into its 192 furnaces to heat its 25 boilers and generate enough superheated steam to spin the immense turbines of its engines.”

— Erik Larson

129. “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

130. “As before, Dodd believed Hitler was “perfectly sincere” about wanting peace. Now, however, the ambassador had realized, as had Messersmith before him, that Hitler’s real purpose was to buy time to allow Germany to rearm. Hitler wanted peace only to prepare for war. “In the back of his mind,” Dodd wrote, “is the old German idea of dominating Europe through warfare.”

— Erik Larson

131. “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

132. “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.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

135. “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

136. “Moonlight was a particular source of dread. That Friday, August 16, Cockett wrote in her diary, “With this gorgeous moon we all expect more tonight.”

— Erik Larson

137. “I thought I’d go to a bookstore and see what moved me.”

— Erik Larson

138. “It would be foolish to disguise the gravity of the hour,” he said. “It would be still more foolish to lose heart and courage.”

— Erik Larson

139. “If you cannot give me all that I want – what my heart finds it hard now to breathe without – it is because I am not worthy. I know instinctively you could give it if I were – and if you understood, – understood the boy’s heart that is in me and the simplicity of my need, which you could fill so that all my days would be radiant.”

— Erik Larson

140. “To Winston Churchill, it was long overdue. In his memoir-like history The World Crisis, 1916–1918, he said of Wilson, “What he did in April, 1917, could have been done in May, 1915. And if done then what abridgment of the slaughter; what sparing of the agony; what ruin, what catastrophes would have been prevented; in how many million homes would an empty chair be occupied today; how different would be the shattered world in which victors and vanquished alike are condemned to live!”

— Erik Larson

141. “One can evade a danger that one recognizes,′ wrote historian Friedrich Zipfel, ’but a police working in the dark becomes uncanny. Nowhere does one feel safe from it. While not omnipresent, it could appear, search arrest. The worried citizen no longer knows whom he ought to trust.”

— Erik Larson

142. “In part, he knew, this happiness was fostered by German law, which forbade cruelty to animals and punished violators with prison, and here Dodd found deepest irony. “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.” He added, “One might easily wish he were a horse!”

— Erik Larson

143. “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

144. “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

145. “Of the 791 passengers designated by Cunard as missing, only 173 bodies, or about 22 percent, were eventually recovered, leaving 618 souls unaccounted for. The percentage for the crew was even more dismal, owing no doubt to the many deaths in the luggage room when the torpedo exploded.”

— Erik Larson

146. “An all-swallowing wave, not unlike a surf comber on a beach, was rushing up the boat deck, enveloping passengers, boats, and everything that lay in its path,” he wrote. A mass wail rose from those it engulfed. “All the despair, terror and anguish of hundreds of souls passing into eternity composed that awful cry.”

— Erik Larson

147. “There were parents sailing to rejoin their children, and children to rejoin their parents, and wives and fathers hoping to get back to their own families, as was the case with Mrs. Arthur Luck of Worcester, Massachusetts, traveling with her two sons, Kenneth Luck and Elbridge Luck, ages eight and nine, to rejoin her husband, a mining engineer who awaited them in England. 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

148. “It is true that in this time people set their faces hard for photographs, partly from custom, partly because of deficits in photographic technology, but this crowd might not have smiled for the better part of a century. The women seem suspended in a state somewhere between melancholy and fury and are surrounded by old men in strange beards that look as if someone had dabbed glue at random points on their faces, then hurled buckets of white hair in their direction.”

— Erik Larson

149. “A dozen or so miles out, Churchill abruptly asked, “Where is Nelson?” Meaning, of course, the cat. Nelson was not in the car; nor did he appear to be in any of the other vehicles. Churchill ordered his driver to turn around and go back to No. 10. There, a secretary cornered the terrified cat and trapped him under a wastebasket. With Nelson safely aboard, the cars resumed their journey. –.”

— Erik Larson

150. “They found a city steaming with heat – 91 degrees on Tuesday, April 27, with four days yet to go until “Straw Hat Day,” Saturday, May 1, when a man could at last break out his summer hats. Men followed this rule. A Times reporter did an impromptu visual survey of Broadway and spotted only two straw hats. “Thousands of sweltering, uncomfortable men plodded along with their winter headgear at all angles on their uncomfortable heads or carried in their hot, moist hands.”

— Erik Larson