Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “As in a great castle which has long contended with time, the mighty central mass of the donjon towered up intact and seemingly everlasting. But the outworks and the battlements had fallen away, and its imperious ruler dwelt only in the special apartments and corridors with which he had a lifelong familiarity.”

— Erik Larson

302. “U-boats in fact traveled underwater as little as possible, typically only in extreme weather or when attacking ships or dodging destroyers.”

— Erik Larson

303. “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

304. “When the long shadows have all merged into one and the stars begin to gleam out over the lake and the domes of the palaces of the White City.”

— Erik Larson

305. “Even the language used by Hitler and party officials was weirdly inverted. The term “fanatical” became a positive trait. Suddenly it connoted what philologist Victor Klemperer, a Jewish resident of Dresden, described as a “happy mix of courage and fervent devotion.”

— Erik Larson

306. “The list of appetizers included stuffed eagles’ eggs.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

308. “Dunwoody had been one of General Hazen’s most ardent critics, objecting at every opportunity to Hazen’s investment in scientific research. He would turn up again years later, in Cuba, doing his best to obstruct the efforts of Cuban meteorologists to transmit warnings about the hurricane of 1900 as it advanced through the Caribbean.”

— Erik Larson

309. “In Minneapolis there had been only silence and the inevitable clumsy petitions of potato-fingered men looking for someone, anyone, to share the agony of their days. That.”

— Erik Larson

310. “It was night time, Inspector Thompson wrote. Those in the plane were transfixed with delight to look down from the windows and see the amazing spectacle of a whole city lighted up. Washington represented something immensely precious. Freedom, hope, strength. We had not seen an illuminated city for two years. My heart filled.”

— Erik Larson

311. “It was the first in a sequence of impossibly rich and voluminous banquets whose menus raised the question of whether any of the city’s leading men could possibly have a functional artery.”

— Erik Larson

312. “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

313. “His quest to create a powerful first impression was good showmanship, but it also exposed the aesthetic despot residing within.”

— Erik Larson

314. “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

315. “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

316. “Dodd read dispatch after dispatch in which Messersmith described Germany’s rapid descent from democratic republic to brutal dictatorship. Messersmith spared no detail – his tendency to write long had early on saddled him with the nickname “Forty-Page George.”

— Erik Larson

317. “It was truly a transitional moment: There he was, at the cusp of the twentieth century, using the telephone to send a telegram.”

— Erik Larson

318. “Hindsight tells us that during that fragile time the course of history could so easily have been changed. Why, then, did no one change it? Why did it take so long to recognize the real danger posed by Hitler and his regime?”

— Erik Larson

319. “She lapsed into “melancholia,” a sweet name for depression.”

— Erik Larson

320. “Edith wrote later, “This was the accidental meeting which carried out the old adage of ’turn a corner and meet your fate.”

— Erik Larson

321. “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

322. “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

323. “As the Pensacola’s twenty-one-man crew readied the ship for its voyage to the city of Pensacola on Florida’s Gulf Coast, two men came aboard as Captain Simmons’s personal guests: a harbor pilot named R. T. Carroll and Galveston’s Pilot Commissioner J. M. O. Menard, from one of the city’s oldest families.”

— Erik Larson

324. “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

325. “Germany issued a proclamation designating the waters around the British Isles an “area of war” in which all enemy ships would be subject to attack without warning.”

— Erik Larson

326. “I had no delusions about Hitler when I was appointed to my post in Berlin,” he answered. “But I had at least hoped to find some decent people around Hitler. I am horrified to discover that the whole gang is nothing but a horde of criminals and cowards.”

— Erik Larson

327. “As a reminder to himself and anyone who visited his office in the shanty, Burnham posted a sign over his desk bearing a single word: RUSH.”

— Erik Larson

328. “It’s a hindrance to be lonely and isolated in one’s work. Ideas stimulate ideas, and the love of writing is contagious.” Martha.”

— Erik Larson

329. “He slashed her throat in a Van Gogh stroke.”

— Erik Larson

330. “It’s not the bombs I’m scared of any more, it’s the weariness,” wrote a female civil servant in her Mass-Observation diary – “trying to work and concentrate with your eyes sticking out of your head like hat-pins, after being up all night. I’d die in my sleep, happily, if only I could sleep.”

— Erik Larson

331. “The decor of the house was by now legendary, and was fast becoming the model for a style of country home decor that emphasized color, comfort, and lack of formality. Its popularity prompted Mrs. Tree to create a home-design firm around the concept. Her future business partner would later describe her aesthetic as one of “pleasing decay.”

— Erik Larson

332. “The one firm rock on which everyone was willing to build for the last two years was the French army,” wrote Foreign Secretary Halifax in his diary, “and the Germans walked through it like they did through the Poles.”

— Erik Larson

333. “Under Stalin, peasants had been forced into vast collectives. Many resisted, and an estimated five million people – men, women, and children – simply disappeared, many shipped off to far-flung work camps.”

— Erik Larson

334. “The fair alone consumed three times as much electricity as the entire city of Chicago.”

— Erik Larson

335. “She was one of America’s few female architects of stature, designer of a revered house in Farmington, which she named Hill-Stead.”

— Erik Larson

336. “Later, a passenger reported seeing a woman giving birth in the water. The idea that this might have been his mother would haunt the boy for the rest of his life.”

— Erik Larson

337. “You don’t pay much attention to the construction of ships?” “No, as long as they float; if they sink, I get out.”

— Erik Larson

338. “You know my dislike for saying ‘good-bye’ and were prepared to find that I had skipped this morning. To say that i was sorry to leave you all is to put it only one half as strongly as I feel.”

— Erik Larson

339. “One cannot possibly get accurate bombing on a selected target in this way.”

— Erik Larson

340. “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

341. “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

342. “Murder was a fascination as always.”

— Erik Larson

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

346. “Klemperer detected a certain “hysteria of language” in the new flood of decrees, alarms, and intimidation – “This perpetual threatening with the death penalty!” – and in strange, inexplicable episodes of paranoid excess, like the recent nationwide search. In all this Klemperer saw a deliberate effort to generate a kind of daily suspense, “copied from American cinema and thrillers,” that helped keep people in line. He also gauged it to be a manifestation of insecurity among those in power. In.”

— Erik Larson

347. “If some of what follows challenges what you have come to believe about Churchill and this era, may I just say that history is a lively abode, full of surprises.”

— Erik Larson

348. “I don’t see how in the course of having to make endless decisions one can avoid some mistakes.”

— Erik Larson

349. “Hitler’s cabinet enacted a new law, to take effect January 1, 1934, called the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, which authorized the sterilization of individuals suffering various physical and mental handicaps.”

— Erik Larson

350. “There were so many items on the menu that Cunard felt obliged to print a separate sheet with suggested combinations, lest one starve from befuddlement.”

— Erik Larson