Scott Jiles

“Man plans, God laughs.”
― Erik Larson, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

“As Wilson mourned his wife, German forces in Belgium entered quiet towns and villages, took civilian hostages, and executed them to discourage resistances. In the town of Dinant, German soldiers shot 612 men, women, and children. The American press called such atrocities acts of "frightfulness," the word then used to describe what later generations would call terrorism. On August 25, German forces bean an assault on the Belgian city of Louvain, the "Oxford of Belgium," a university town that was home to an important library. Three days of shelling and murder left 209 civilians dead, 1,100 buildings incinerated, and the library destroyed, along with its 230,000 books, priceless manuscripts, and artifacts. The assault was deemed an affront to just to Belgium but to the world. Wilson, a past president of Princeton University, "felt deeply the destruction of Louvain," according to his friend, Colonel House; the president feared "the war would throw the world back three or four centuries.”
― Erik Larson, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

“Adventure, with all its requisite danger and wildness, is a deeply spiritual longing written into the soul of man.”
― John Eldredge, Wild at Heart Revised and Updated: Discovering the Secret of a Man's Soul

“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