Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “I thought I’d go to a bookstore and see what moved me.”

— Erik Larson

152. “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

153. “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

154. “I think my thought and imagination contain the picture and perceive its significance from every point of view. I have to force myself not to dwell upon it to avoid the sort of numbness that comes from deep apprehension and dwelling upon elements too vast to be yet comprehended or in any way controlled by counsel.”

— Erik Larson

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “A Grape-Nuts ad dealt with warfare, but of the schoolyard variety, extolling the cereal’s value in helping children prevail in fistfights: “Husky bodies and stout nerves depend – more often than we think – on the food eaten.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

163. “If we can’t be safe, let us at least be comfortable.”

— Erik Larson

164. “Galveston was too pretty, too progressive, too prosperous – entirely too hopeful – to be true.”

— Erik Larson

165. “When I look back on the perils which have been overcome, upon the great mountain waves in which the gallant ship has driven, when I remember all that has gone wrong, and remember also all that has gone right, I feel sure we have no need to fear the tempest. Let it roar, and let it rage. We shall come through.”

— Erik Larson

166. “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

167. “The outcome was clear to Dodd well before the votes were counted. He wrote to Roosevelt, “The election here is a farce.” Nothing indicated this more clearly than the vote within the camp at Dachau: 2,154 of 2,242 prisoners – 96 percent – voted in favor of Hitler’s government. On.”

— Erik Larson

168. “Another man packed a gold seal for stamping wax on the back of an envelope, with the Latin motto Tuta Tenebo, “I will keep you safe.”

— Erik Larson

169. “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

170. “The resulting prose, he wrote, “may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officialese jargon. But the saving of time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clear thinking.”

— Erik Larson

171. “Churchill’s great trick – one he had demonstrated before, and would demonstrate again – was his ability to deliver dire news and yet leave his audience feeling encouraged and uplifted.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

173. “Ambition had been the curse of my husband’s life. He wanted to attain a position where he would be honored and respected. He wanted wealth.”

— Erik Larson

174. “Where in May 1915 the navy had only thirty U-boats, by 1917 it had more than one hundred, many larger and more powerful than Schwieger’s U-20 and carrying more torpedoes.”

— Erik Larson

175. “Jack the Ripper became the embodiment, forever, of pure evil. Every Chicago resident who could read devoured these reports from abroad, but none with quite so much intensity as Dr. H. H. Holmes.”

— Erik Larson

176. “I am convinced that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

— Erik Larson

177. “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

178. “Once, in a time long past when men believed they could part mountains, a very different building stood in the Wal-Mart’s place, and behind its mist-clouded windows ninety-three children who did not know better happily awaited the coming of the sea.”

— Erik Larson

179. “The story, too, tends to illustrate the end of the century.”

— Erik Larson

180. “A gyroscope kept the torpedo on course, adjusting for vertical and horizontal deflection. 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

181. “All I hope is that it is not too late... I am very much afraid that it is. But we can only do our best, and give the rest of what we have – whatever there may be left to us.”

— Erik Larson

182. “Do you think all these people would be booking passage on the Lusitania if they thought she could be caught by a German submarine? Why it’s the best joke I’ve heard in many days, this talk of torpedoing the Lusitania.′ Both Vanderbilt and Turner laughed.”

— Erik Larson

183. “Hunt was the janissary of a dead vernacular.”

— Erik Larson

184. “Homicide, or rather the homicide fantasy, is the engine that drives America’s fascination with guns. Target shooters spend hour after hour.”

— Erik Larson

185. “We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down.”

— Erik Larson

186. “Isaac, at this point, still considered Moore a personal friend. It hurt him, no doubt, that Moore had distorted the story of his experience in the storm. Isaac had lost his wife and home, and had nearly lost a daughter, but Moore could not be bothered with the actual details.”

— Erik Larson

187. “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.”

— Erik Larson

188. “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

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

— Erik Larson

190. “I think I should never willingly cease drifting in that dreamland. 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.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

192. “From the very start, Churchill understood a fundamental truth about the war: that he could not win it without the eventual participation of the United States. Left to itself, he believed, Britain could endure and hold Germany at bay, but only the industrial might and manpower of America would ensure the final eradication of Hitler and National Socialism.”

— Erik Larson

193. “His genius was betrayed by lofty and indomitable traits of character which could not yield or compromise. And so his life was a tragedy of inconsequence.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

195. “German people, he said, would follow Hitler with absolute loyalty “provided they are allowed to have a share in the making and carrying out of decisions, provided every word of criticism is not immediately interpreted as malicious, and provided that despairing patriots are not branded as traitors.” The time had come, he proclaimed, “to silence doctrinaire fanatics.”

— Erik Larson

196. “Unmistakable and invulnerable, a floating village in steel, the Lusitania glided by in the night as a giant black shadow cast upon the sea.”

— Erik Larson

197. “Sentences wandered through the report like morning glory through the pickets of a fence.”

— Erik Larson

198. “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.”

— Erik Larson

199. “THAT DAY, AS A herald of the invasion that seemed soon to come, the Germans seized and occupied Guernsey, a British dependency in the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy, less than two hundred air miles from Chequers. It was a minor action – the Germans held the island with only 469 soldiers – but troubling all the same.”

— Erik Larson

200. “Such peaceful intervals never lasted long.”

— Erik Larson