Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “I felt like a child, ebullient and careless, the intoxication of the new regime working like wine in me.”

— Erik Larson

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “German navy had its own tradition of assigning nicknames. One very tall commander was nicknamed Seestiefel, or sea boot. Another had a reputation for smelling bad and thus was nicknamed Hein Schniefelig, or stinky person. A third was said to be “very childish and good-natured” and was commonly called Das Kind, the child.”

— Erik Larson

159. “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

160. “Rudolf Diels, the young chief of the Gestapo. He moved with ease and confidence, yet unlike Putzi Hanfstaengl, who invaded a room, he entered unobtrusively, seeping in like a malevolent fog.”

— Erik Larson

161. “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

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. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Erik Larson

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Erik Larson

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

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

— Erik Larson

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

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. “Such peaceful intervals never lasted long.”

— Erik Larson

186. “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

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

— Erik Larson

188. “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

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

— Erik Larson

190. “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

191. “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

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

— Erik Larson

193. “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

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

— Erik Larson

195. “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

196. “History is full of lessons about the redemption of Lost Causes.”

— Erik Larson

197. “Straw Hat Day,” Saturday, May 1, when a man could at last break out his summer hats. Men followed this rule.”

— Erik Larson

198. “He joined the crew of the Lake Champlain, a small steam-powered cargo ship owned by the Beaver Line of Canada but subsequently acquired by the Canadian Pacific Railway. He was its second officer in May 1901, when it became the first merchant vessel to be equipped with wireless.”

— Erik Larson

199. “Her gayety seemed like jewels on a skull.”

— Erik Larson

200. “Mass-Observation diarist Olivia Cockett also found it repellent. “It shouldn’t be allowed,” she insisted. “It makes play and sport of agonies, not to help people bear them, but to pander to the basest, crudest, most-to-be-wiped-out feelings of cruel violence.”

— Erik Larson