Erik Larson Quotes

His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.

I was born with the devil in me,' [Holmes] wrote. 'I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.

Time lost can never be recovered...and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.

It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root. This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history.

I thought I'd go to a bookstore and see what moved me.

Beneath the stars the lake lay dark and sombre," Stead wrote, "but on its shores gleamed and glowed in golden radiance the ivory city, beautiful as a poet's dream, silent as a city of the dead.

I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold.

Chicago has disappointed her enemies and astonished the world

. . . why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow.

Leaves hung in the stillness like hands of the newly dead.

There's something so relentless and foul about Hitler and his people, and the way things progressed from year to year. It just got to me in the strangest way.

Whenever I finish a book, I start with a blank slate and never have ideas lined up.

I'm very perverse. If someone tells me I have to read a book, I'm instantly disinclined to do so.

No one cared what St. Louis thought, although the city got a wink for pluck.

The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again.

I was never concretely aware of the extent of anti-Semitism in the United States and in the upper levels of the State Department.

Dodd continued to hope that the murders would so outrage the German public that the regime would fall, but as the days passed he saw no evidence of any such outpouring of anger.

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.

Reading Mission to Paris is like sipping a fine Chateau Margaux: Sublime!

I like all kinds of music, though I tend to prefer jazz and classics.

Reading is such a personal thing to me. I'd much rather give someone a gift certificate to a bookstore, and let that person choose his or her own books.

I started reading the big histories and the small histories, the memoirs and so forth. At some point, I found the diary of William E. Dodd.

Great murderers, like great men in other walks of activity, have blue eyes.

I pride myself on having a journalistic remove.

It's all right to drill your crew, but why not drill the passengers.

There began to appear before my romantic eyes...a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape.

He disliked the social obligations of the captaincy.

They looked more like day laborers than seamen.

There were always those passengers who came aboard bearing grudges against the modern age.

Murder was a fascination as always.

New York's perennial attraction was shopping.

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

I always thought a shipwreck was a well-organized affair, but I've learned the devil a lot in the last five minutes.

During World War I, Germany had only 25 of its vaunted submarines sailing at any one time.

My prophetic task would be twofold: to stand up to him, and to stand by him. To awaken his conscience, and to salve the pain this would cause him.

My between-books strategy was reading voraciously and on a whim.

One question that often comes up is why, in this age of blogs and tweets and instant digital communication of all kinds, it still takes so long to publish a book.