Erik Larson > Quotes

“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.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood.

Daniel H. Burnham”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

“I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“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.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“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. In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“No system which implies control by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse.”
― Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

“Beside his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“My favorite “trick” is to stop writing at a point where I know that I can pick up easily the next day. I’ll stop in mid-paragraph, often in midsentence. It makes getting out of bed so much easier, because I know that all I’ll have to do to be productive is complete the sentence. And by then I’ll be seated at my desk, coffee and Oreo cookie at hand, the morning’s inertia overcome. There’s an added advantage: The human brain hates incomplete sentences. All night my mind will have secretly worked on the passage and likely mapped out the remainder of the page, even the chapter, while simultaneously sending me on a dinner date with Cate Blanchett.”
― Erik Larson

“. . . why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“Place has always been important to me, and one thing today's Chicago exudes, as it did in 1893, is a sense of place. I fell in love with the city, the people I encountered, and above all the lake and its moods, which shift so readily from season to season, day to day, even hour to hour.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“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, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

“Great murderers, like great men in other walks of activity, have blue eyes.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“The smell of peace is abroad, the air is cold, the skies are brittle, and the leaves have finally fallen. I wear a pony coat with skin like watered silk and muff of lamb. My fingers lie in depths of warmth. I have a jacket of silver sequins and heavy bracelets of rich corals. I wear about my neck a triple thread-like chain of lapis lazulis and pearls. On my face is softness and content like a veil of golden moonlight. And I have never in all my lives been so lonely.”
― Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

“The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again. ”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“Holmes was charming and gracious, but something about him made Belknap uneasy. He could not have defined it. Indeed, for the next several decades alienists and their successors would find themselves hard-pressed to describe with any precision what it was about men like Holmes that could cause them to seem warm and ingratiating but also telegraph the vague sense that some important element of humanness was missing.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“Recalling his first impression of Hitler, Hanfstaengl wrote, "Hitler looked like a suburban hairdresser on his day off.”
― Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

“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.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“Chicago has disappointed her enemies and astonished the world”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“No one could bear the idea of the White City lying empty and desolate. A Cosmopolitan writer said, "Better to have it vanish suddenly, in a blaze of glory, than fall into gradual disrepair and dilapidation. There is no more melancholy spectacle than a festal hall, the morning after the banquet, when the guests have departed and the lights are extinguished.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“People seemed to believe that technology had stripped hurricanes of their power to kill. No hurricane expert endorsed this view.”
― Erik Larson, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

“Coordination' occurred with astonishing speed, even in sectors of life not directly targeted by specific laws, as Germans willingly placed themselves under the sway of Nazi rule, a phenomenon that became known as Selbtsgleichschaltung, or 'self-coordination.' Change came to Germany so quickly and across such a wide front that German citizens who left the country for business or travel returned to find everything around them altered, as if they were characters in a horror movie who come back to find that people who once were their friends, clients, patients, and customers have become different in ways hard to discern.”
― Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

“Perhaps, Herr Ditzen, it is less important where one lives than how one lives.”
― Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

“Time lost can never be recovered...and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.”
― Erik Larson, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

“In Germany, Dodd had noticed, no one ever abused a dog, and as a consequence dogs were never fearful around men and were always plump and obviously well tended. "Only horses seem to be equally happy, never children or the youth," he wrote. ... He called it "horse happiness" and had noticed the same phenomenon in Nuremburg and Dresden. In part, he knew this happiness was fostered by German law, which forbade cruelty to animals and punished violators with prison.
"At a time when hundreds of men have been put to death without trial or any sort of evidence of guilt, and when the population literally trembles with fear, animals have rights guaranteed them which men and women cannot think of expecting."
He added, "One might easily wish he were a horse!”
― Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

“I will be on the look out for you, my dear girl," he wrote. "You must expect to give yourself up when you come." For this buttoned-up age, for Burnham, it was a letter that could have steamed itself open.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“For now, the tension was subtle, a vibration, like the inaudible cry of overstressed steel.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“Germans grew reluctant to stay in communal ski lodges, fearing they might talk in their sleep. They postponed surgeries because of the lip-loosening effects of anesthetic. Dreams reflected the ambient anxiety. One German dreamed that an SA man came to his home and opened the door to his oven, which then repeated every negative remark the household had made against the government.”
― Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

“Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”
― Erik Larson, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz

“It is slothful not to compress your thoughts,” he said.”
― Erik Larson, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz