Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “I have never liked Americans, except odd ones. In the mass I have always thought them dreadful!”

— Erik Larson

252. “The dinner became infamous. Later, in midsummer, Britain’s Ambassador Phipps would observe in his diary that of the seven people who sat down to dine at the Regendanz mansion that night, four had been murdered, one had fled the country under threat of death, and another had been imprisoned in a concentration camp. Phipps wrote, “The list of casualties for one dinner party might make even a Borgia envious.”

— Erik Larson

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Erik Larson

256. “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

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

259. “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

260. “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

261. “All the young are in the net,” he wrote, “anyone who tried to keep out of being a Nazi is hazed till they change their mind; a form of mass cruelty which exists only in such a country.”

— Erik Larson

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Erik Larson

266. “Whether Venetia and Asquith had ever had a physical relationship remained for all but them an unresolved question, although if word volume alone were a measure of romantic intensity, Asquith was a man lost irreclaimably to love.”

— Erik Larson

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

274. “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

275. “She saw Hitler as “a clown who looked like Charlie Chaplin.” Like many others in America at this time and elsewhere in the world, she could not imagine him lasting very long or being taken seriously.”

— Erik Larson

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

286. “Root was a notorious bon vivant, whom Louis Sullivan once described as “a man of the world, of the flesh, and considerably of the devil.”

— Erik Larson

287. “My darling atheist,” she recalled telling him, “why do you help me decorate a Christmas tree to celebrate the birth of Christ?” He laughed. “This isn’t for Christians or for Christ, liebes Kind,” he said, “only for pagans like you and me. Anyway, it is very beautiful.”

— Erik Larson

288. “In the end, Dodd proved to be exactly what Roosevelt had wanted, a lone beacon of American freedom and hope in a land of gathering darkness.”

— Erik Larson

289. “When the conversation turned to Germany’s persecution of Jews, Colonel House urged Dodd to do all he could “to ameliorate Jewish sufferings” but added a caveat: “the Jews should not be allowed to dominate economic or intellectual life in Berlin as they have done for a long time.” In this, Colonel House expressed a sentiment pervasive in America, that Germany’s Jews were at least partly responsible for their own troubles. Dodd.”

— Erik Larson

290. “One study of Nazi records found that of a sample of 213 denunciations, 37 percent arose not from heartfelt political belief but from private conflicts, with the trigger often breathtakingly trivial. In October 1933, for example, the clerk at a grocery store turned in a cranky customer who had stubbornly insisted on receiving three pfennigs in change. The clerk accused her of failure to pay taxes. Germans.”

— Erik Larson

291. “At Randolph-Macon, Dodd promptly got himself into hot water. In 1902 he published an article in the Nation in which he attacked a successful campaign by the Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans to have Virginia ban a history textbook that the veterans deemed an affront to southern honor. Dodd charged that the veterans believed the only valid histories were those that held that the South “was altogether right in seceding from the Union.”

— Erik Larson

292. “Murder was a fascination as always.”

— Erik Larson

293. “Oh, so many things swarmed in my thoughts,” she wrote; “and yet each time I was with him I felt the charm of his presence.”

— Erik Larson

294. “But fighter production lagged. England’s aircraft plants operated on a prewar schedule that did not take into account the new reality of having a hostile force based just across the channel. Production, though increasing, was suppressed by the fusty practices of a peacetime bureaucracy only now awakening to the realities of total war. Shortages of parts and materials disrupted production.”

— Erik Larson

295. “The Death of Boris,’ by Mussorgsky?”

— Erik Larson

296. “We are all well and satisfied with the amount and variety of work our good fortune has given us to do.”

— Erik Larson

297. “Night is the magician of the fair.”

— Erik Larson

298. “William Manchester and Paul Reid’s Defender of the Realm, Roy Jenkins’s Churchill, and Martin Gilbert’s Finest Hour – but then to plunge.”

— Erik Larson

299. “A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don’t find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting. J. M. Barrie “Dedication” Peter Pan 1904.”

— Erik Larson

300. “The ministry’s array of “secret transmitters,” masquerading as English radio stations but based in Germany, were now to be deployed, “to arouse alarm and fear among the British people.” They were to take pains to disguise their German origins, even to the point of starting broadcasts with criticism of the Nazi Party, and fill their reports.”

— Erik Larson