Quotes from Erik Larson

Root was a notorious bon vivant, whom Louis Sullivan once described as "a man of the world, of the flesh, and considerably of the devil.

The becomingness of everything that may be seen as a modestly contributive part of a grand whole.

to say that their mental health is not being undermined by bombing is to talk nonsense.

After a few minutes, Churchill broke the silence, saying, "Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few." The remark had such power that Ismay quoted it to his wife after returning home. He had no idea that Churchill would soon deploy the line in one of his most famous speeches.

Ambition had been the curse of my husband's life. He wanted to attain a position where he would be honored and respected. He wanted wealth.

It is slothful not to compress your thoughts

closer, and to be concentrating on Whitehall.

He slashed her throat in a Van Gogh stroke.

These were the descendants of the colonials returning now at Britain's hour of need, the moment captured in an immediately famous painting by Bernard Gribble, The Return of the Mayflower.

He was a loner and intellectually intolerant.

It was conceived out of hubris and anxiety, at a time—1903—when Britain feared it was losing the race for dominance of the passenger-ship industry.

A ghostly virga of ice followed it through the night

With that as my guiding question, I set out on what became a lengthy journey through the vast and tangled forest of Churchill scholarship, a realm of giant volumes, distorted facts, and bizarre conspiracy theories, to try to find my personal Churchill. As I've discovered with prior books, when you look at the past through a fresh lens, you invariably see the world differently and find new material and insights even along well-trodden paths.

Outside the sky was blank, the light pewter.

Chamberlain, borrowing words used by Oliver Cromwell in 1653: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing! Depart, I say, and let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!

Anyone wishing to bring his own Kodak to the fair had to buy a permit for two dollars

At stake was not only the British Empire but all of Christian civilization. "The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.

slothful not to compress your thoughts," he said.

Slowly the energy left her, and her hands began to move in slow arcs, soothing and sensuous, the wild drums silent. Ballet now, a pastoral exit.

scarify, a six-hundred-year-old word that only Churchill would use in crucial diplomatic correspondence—" would scarify their names for a thousand years of history.

In shelters, the danger posed by poison gas was a particular concern. People were encouraged to wear their gas masks for thirty minutes a day, so that they would grow accustomed to their use. Children took part in gas-attack drills. All the little children of five have Mickey Mouse gasmasks, wrote Diana Cooper in her diary. They love putting them on for drill and at once start trying to kiss each other, then they march into their shelter singing: 'There'll always be an England.

After a few moment he reached for her wrist and felt her pulse fade to nothing, like the rumble of a receding train.

Sleep to gather strength for the morning. For the morning will come.

friend is someone who knows all about you and