Les Standiford > Quotes

“The more a man learns, Dickens said, “the better, gentler, kinder man he must become. When he knows how much great minds have suffered for the truth in every age and time… he will become more tolerant of other men’s belief in all matters, and will incline more leniently to their sentiments when they chance to differ from his own.”
― Les Standiford, The Man Who Invented Christmas (Movie Tie-In): How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits

“largesse,”
― Les Standiford, Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Transformed America

“To Dickens, true charity was a matter of openhearted benevolence; to use the relief of poverty as a cudgel to beat a recipient into piousness was repellent and evil.”
― Les Standiford, The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits

“the value of a personal fortune is better understood in relation to the total gross national product of an individual’s era. By that measure, Carnegie was worth $112 billion in his day, far ahead of Bill Gates ($85 billion), Sam Walton ($42 billion), or Warren Buffett ($31 billion).”
― Les Standiford, Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Transformed America

“And yet he forced himself to confront hard truths. Perhaps it was not “them”—the jealous critics and the fickle readers—in whom the fault lay. Perhaps he had let his disappointment with America in particular and with human nature in general overwhelm his powers of storytelling and characterization in his recent work—perhaps he had simply taken it for granted that an adoring public would sit still for whatever he offered it.”
― Les Standiford, The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits

“Most important, perhaps there was a way to do so without browbeating or scolding, or mounting a soapbox. Perhaps he could get them without their knowing they were got. If he could only find the way.”
― Les Standiford, The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits

“Dickens’s enduring themes: the deleterious effects of ignorance and want, the necessity for charity, the benefits of goodwill, family unity, and the need for celebration of the life force, including the pleasures of good food and drink, and good company.”
― Les Standiford, The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits

“That's easy," Russell said. "Because everybody else in this here place is crooked as a dog's hind leg. ...”
― Les Standiford, Bone Key

“Ebenezer Scrooge is no castoff drunk, but the very emblem of economic achievement.”
― Les Standiford, The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits

“According to California Department of Transportation figures, upward of 275,000 vehicles travel Interstae 5 through the Newhall Pass dividing the Santa Clarita and San Fernando watersheds each day. There is no way to tally the number of individuals inside those vehicles, but taking into account the tendency of the average American driver, it is safe to speculate that at least 275,001 travelers per day have the opportunity to glance eastward of the thundering highway ...”
― Les Standiford

“It’s like you’ve been in a terrible accident and had your arm amputated,” she told him. “After a while, the pain goes away, and eventually you even learn to get along without your arm. Some days you’re sad that you’re missing your arm, and some days you’re angry about it, and some days you’re okay. But, no matter what, no matter how long it’s been, you never stop missing your arm.”
― Les Standiford, Bringing Adam Home: The Abduction That Changed America

“The more a man learns, Dickens said, “the better, gentler, kinder man he must become. When he knows how much great minds have suffered for the truth in every age and time…he will become more tolerant of other men’s belief in all matters,”
― Les Standiford, The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits

“Daniel Maclise (whose 1839 oil of Dickens hangs today at the National Portrait Gallery).”
― Les Standiford, The Man Who Invented Christmas (Movie Tie-In): How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits

“You don't seem to care to talk about yourself," [Lefevre] said to Flagler.
"I prefer to let what I have done speak for me," Flagler replied.
"By their works ye shall know them," Lefevre suggested.
"Yes, that's it," Flagler said - as eagerly as he had said anything, according to his interviewer.”
― Les Standiford, Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean

“The train’s conductor, J. F. Gamble, flung himself into the cab, his uniform soaked and dripping, to report the worst: one of the hundred-ton boxcars at the rear of the train had been toppled by the wind and waves, automatically locking the air brakes on the entire chain.”
― Les Standiford, Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean

“allowing the cynical reader to proceed contentedly through the story alongside the sentimentalist.”
― Les Standiford, The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits

“Permanent construction of the sort Flagler was referring to would not come cheaply, however. Early in 1910, Flagler wrote to John Carrere, designer of the Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine, that repairing the damage caused by the hurricane had actually cost him $1 million, and reiterated that it had taught him a valuable lesson about upgrading the quality of the work. He estimated that it would require at least another $9 million to push the track to Key West, a figure that did not include the costs of a terminal and docking facilities.”
― Les Standiford, Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean

“In his profession, Wright had seen horror stacked on horror, plenty of evidence that there was no shortage of hell right here on earth. As to what had kept him sane in the face of all that he had witnessed, it was a simple sense of purpose. “It is that simple, John,” Wright said. “There is evil. And there is good.”
― Les Standiford, Bringing Adam Home: The Abduction That Changed America

“The houses there sat on lots of an acre or more, and some neighbors still kept horses. The urban centers of Fort Lauderdale and Miami were nearby, and if you wanted a dose of the city, you could easily get it.”
― Les Standiford, Bringing Adam Home: The Abduction That Changed America

“It”
― Les Standiford, Bringing Adam Home: The Abduction That Changed America

“Dickens believed that a reasonable capitalistic society could be made to recognize its responsibility to all its citizens, and that it was the duty of those most fortunate to share a portion of their gain with those whose grasp had slipped while pulling at their bootstraps.”
― Les Standiford, The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits

“Society.” John Forster, who would one day become Dickens’s great friend, adviser, editor, and first biographer, wrote in the Examiner that Dickens had excelled particularly in his portraits of the ludicrous and the pathetic, all rendered in an “agreeable, racy style.”
― Les Standiford, The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits

“explain the actions and motives of a character or to deliver an exegesis on the nature of the world surrounding him, was completely acceptable.”
― Les Standiford, The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits

“Then why on earth had she never told anyone about these things? Matthews asked. Linda didn’t miss a beat. “Because no one ever asked,” she said. “You’re the first that ever did.”
― Les Standiford, Bringing Adam Home: The Abduction That Changed America

“One worker housed in Camp No. 10 on Key Vaca was overheard to say, “Building this railroad has become a regular marathon.” The remark struck a chord in his fellow workers, who dubbed their camp “Marathon,” the name by which the nearby town, the second-largest in the Keys, is known today.”
― Les Standiford, Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean

“he formed a lifelong commitment to the distinction between “justice” and “the law.”
― Les Standiford, The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits

“paean”
― Les Standiford, The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits

“As even newly elected presidents have learned, trying to correct the conduct of business as usual in the federal bureaucracy is like trying to nudge an ocean liner off its path by standing on a rubber raft and pressing on the liner’s hull with your bare hands as it speeds by.”
― Les Standiford, Bringing Adam Home: The Abduction That Changed America

“It is worth noting here, that in attracting 100,000 readers to issues of The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens was reaching an unprecedented portion of his country’s audience. While no formal records of literacy rates were kept at the time, Francis Jeffrey (Lord Jeffrey), the eminent jurist and founder of the Edinburgh Review, wrote in an 1844 issue of that magazine that there might be 300,000 readers among the middle class in England (out of a total population of about 2 million), with perhaps another 30,000 in the upper classes. And even if the total readership was 500,000, as some commentators have suggested, Dickens was still selling his work to somewhere between one-fifth and one-quarter of the literate public of a nation. Compare those figures with modern-day America, where 200 million or so working, literate adults constitute the potential “book-buying public,” and where a sale of 75,000 to 100,000 copies—one-twentieth of one percent—is often enough to put an author high up on the list of New York Times bestsellers.”
― Les Standiford, The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits

“led to the emigration of one such unemployed Scottish hand-weaver named Carnegie to the United States, where his son Andrew would become the chief industrialist of all time.)”
― Les Standiford, The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits