Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “I felt like a child, ebullient and careless, the intoxication of the new regime working like wine in me.”

— Erik Larson

202. “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

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

— Erik Larson

204. “After a few moment he reached for her wrist and felt her pulse fade to nothing, like the rumble of a receding train.”

— Erik Larson

205. “People were encouraged to wear their gas masks for thirty minutes a day, so that they would grow accustomed to their use. Children took part in gas-attack drills. “All the little children of five have Mickey Mouse gas-masks,” wrote Diana Cooper in her diary. “They love putting them on for drill and at once start trying to kiss each other, then they march into their shelter singing: ‘There’ll always be an England.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

207. “Yet gun dealers sell guns in America the way Rite Aid sells toothpaste, denying at every step of the way the true nature of the products they sell and absolving themselves of any and all responsibility for their role in the resulting mayhem.”

— Erik Larson

208. “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

209. “He broke prevailing rules of casual intimacy: He stood too close, stared too hard, touched too much and long. And women adored him for it.”

— Erik Larson

210. “The official burdens on your shoulders are indeed heavy. I write to tell you how deeply I sympathize with you in having to bear this new burden of personal loss and sorrow.”

— Erik Larson

211. “Sleep to gather strength for the morning. For the morning will come.”

— Erik Larson

212. “Where Room 40 promised to give Britain the clearest advantage was in the battle for control of the seas, and there Britain’s strategy had undergone a change.”

— Erik Larson

213. “He died angry,” Chalmers said, “because I didn’t believe him. Even in death he is emphatic and imperious.”

— Erik Larson

214. “With the physique of a bank safe, he was the embodiment of quiet strength.”

— Erik Larson

215. “Holmes explained that he had been doing some dissection but now had completed his research. He offered Chappell thirty-six dollars to cleanse the bones and skull and return to him a fully articulated skeleton. Chappell agreed. Holmes and Chappell placed the body in a trunk lined with duckcloth. An express company delivered it to Chappell’s house.”

— Erik Larson

216. “Vibration due to heavy gunfire or other causes will be felt much less if you do not lie with your head against the wall.”

— Erik Larson

217. “According to Home Intelligence, “People living near guns are suffering from serious lack of sleep: a number of interviews made round one gun in West London showed that people were getting much less sleep than others a few hundred yards away.” But no one wanted the guns to stop. “There is little complaint about lack of sleep, mainly because of the new exhilaration created by the barrage. Nevertheless this serious loss of sleep needs watching.”

— Erik Larson

218. “Up to our time,” he said, “strict economy in the use of natural resources has not been practiced, but it must be henceforth unless we are immoral enough to impair conditions in.”

— Erik Larson

219. “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

220. “These were the descendants of the colonials returning now at Britain’s hour of need, the moment captured in an immediately famous painting by Bernard Gribble, The Return of the Mayflower.”

— Erik Larson

221. “One line stood out with particular clarity: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

— Erik Larson

222. “The ranks included a carpenter and furniture-maker named Elias Disney, who in coming years would tell many stories about the construction of this magical realm beside the lake. His son Walt would take note.”

— Erik Larson

223. “A single German submarine, Unterseeboot-9 – U-9, for short – commanded by Kptlt. Otto Weddigen, had sunk all three ships, killing 1,459 British sailors, many of them young men in their teens.”

— Erik Larson

224. “In his last moments, she said, he had run his fingers over his bedding as if playing the piano. “Do you hear that?” he whispered. “Isn’t it wonderful? That’s what I call music.”

— Erik Larson

225. “The city seemed untroubled by the war. Broadway – “the Great White Way,” so dubbed for its bright electric lighting – came brilliantly alight and alive each night, as always, although now with unexpected competition. A number of restaurants had begun providing lavish entertainment along with meals, even though they lacked theater licenses. The city was threatening a crackdown on these maverick “cabarets.”

— Erik Larson

226. “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

227. “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

228. “Having seen it,” Rudyard Kipling wrote, “I desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.”

— Erik Larson

229. “German U-boats were sinking ships at such a high rate that Admiralty officials secretly predicted Britain would be forced to capitulate by November 1, 1917. During the worst month, April, any ship leaving Britain had a one-in-four chance of being sunk. In.”

— Erik Larson

230. “In Calumet a thousand ornate streetlamps stood in a swamp, where they did nothing but ignite the fog and summon auras of mosquitoes.”

— Erik Larson

231. “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

232. “The man condemned for having ‘wheels in his head’ had gotten them out of his head and into the heart of the Midway Plaisance.”

— Erik Larson

233. “Long before the fair’s end, people began mourning its inevitable passage. Mary Hartwell Catherwood wrote, “What shall we do when this Wonderland is closed? – when it disappears – when the enchantment comes to an end?” One lady manager, Sallie Cotton of North Carolina, a mother of six children staying in Chicago for the summer, captured in her diary a common worry: that after seeing the fair, “everything will seem small and insignificant.”

— Erik Larson

234. “However strange or macabre some of the following incidents may seem, this is not a work of fiction.”

— Erik Larson

235. “I found the actual notes that Prendergast sent to Alfred Trude. I saw how deeply the pencil dug into the paper.”

— Erik Larson

236. “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

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

— Erik Larson

238. “In shelters, the danger posed by poison gas was a particular concern. People were encouraged to wear their gas masks for thirty minutes a day, so that they would grow accustomed to their use.”

— Erik Larson

239. “Pamela’s husband, Randolph, newly minted member of Parliament, missed the birth. He was in London, in bed with the wife of an Austrian tenor, whose monocled image appeared on cigarette trading cards.”

— Erik Larson

240. “In the glacier of words grinding toward the twentieth century, Prendergast’s card was a single fragment of mica glinting with lunacy, pleading to be picked up and pocketed.”

— Erik Larson

241. “He cared little about whether they had expertise with airplanes. “They are all captains of industry, and industry is like theology,” Beaverbrook said. “If you know the rudiments of one faith you can grasp the meaning of another.”

— Erik Larson

242. “Tears come without any provocation.10 Headache all day.” The school’s headmistress and founder, Sarah Porter, offered therapeutic counsel. “Cheer up,” she told Theodate.11 “Always be happy.” It did not work.”

— Erik Larson

243. “Churchill himself found it all thrilling. “After all,” he told an interviewer with the Chicago Daily News later that week, “what more glorious thing can a spirited young man experience than meeting an opponent at four hundred miles an hour, with twelve or fifteen hundred horse power in his hands and unlimited offensive power? It is the most splendid form of hunting conceivable.”

— Erik Larson

244. “It was a difficult ride for him. He had passed this way before, to bury John Root. The fair had begun with death, and now it had ended with death.”

— Erik Larson

245. “Tea was comfort and history; above all, it was English. As long as there was tea, there was England.”

— Erik Larson

246. “You’ll see it lovely. I never will. But it will be lovely.”

— Erik Larson

247. “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

248. “I have examined the laws of the United States carefully and I do not find any law which says that a white man shall be punished for killing a Chinaman.”

— Erik Larson

249. “On a crystalline fall day you can almost hear the tinkle of fine crystal, the rustle of silk and wool, almost smell the expensive cigars.”

— Erik Larson

250. “The edition was full of fresh detail about the North London Cellar Murder and the escalating search for two suspects, a doctor and his lover.”

— Erik Larson