Quotes from Erik Larson

I think I should never willingly cease drifting in that dreamland. I find it all infinitely sad, but at the same time so entrancing, that I often feel as if it would be the part of wisdom to fly at once to the woods or mountains where one can always find peace. - Dora Root

The frontier may indeed have closed at last, as Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed in his history-making speech at the fair, but for that moment it stood there glittering in the sun like the track of a spent tear.

Dunwoody had been one of General Hazen's most ardent critics, objecting at every opportunity to Hazen's investment in scientific research. He would turn up again years later, in Cuba, doing his best to obstruct the efforts of Cuban meteorologists to transmit warnings about the hurricane of 1900 as it advanced through the Caribbean.

Stature [was] a powerful lure in this age when pride of place ranked second only to pride of blood.

What he craved was possession and the power it gave him; what he adored was anticipation - the slow acquisition of love, then life, and finally the secrets within. The ultimate disposition of the material was irrelevant, a recreation.

He broke prevailing rules of casual intimacy: He stood too close, stared too hard, touched too much and long. And women adored him for it.

The exposition went with Westinghouse, and helped change the history of electricity.

His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries

I had started with nothing, and if I now found myself with nothing, I was at least even. Actually, I was much better than even: I had had a wonderful time." Bloom

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.

On August 3 a big Chicago bank, Lazarus Silverman, failed.

I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing. DR. H. H. HOLMES CONFESSION 1896

All you need to be married are champagne, a box of cigars, and a double bed," he said. Or this: "One of the secrets of a happy marriage is never to speak to or see the loved one before noon.

Samuel Gompers, standing at the back of speaker's wagon No. 5, ask, "Why should the wealth of the country be stored in banks and elevators while the idle workman wanders homeless about the streets and the idle loafers who hoard the gold only to spend it in riotous living are rolling about in fine carriages from which they look out on peaceful meetings and call them riots?" For

chancellor of the exchequer

The man condemned for having 'wheels in his head' had gotten them out of his head and into the heart of the Midway Plaisance

His genius was betrayed by lofty and indomitable traits of character which could not yield or compromise. And so his life was a tragedy of inconsequence.

One immense German bomb, a thirteen-foot, four-thousand-pounder named Satan, could destroy an entire city block.

most likely explanation is that there was indeed a plot, however imperfect, to endanger the Lusitania in order to involve the United States in the war.

As labor strife increased and the economy faltered, the general level of violence rose.

Stanley Baldwin, then deputy prime minister, gave the House of Commons a forecast of what was to come: "I think it is well for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through." The only effective defense lay in offense, he said, "which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.

Asked later how this feat had been achieved, Morton answered, "If you had to jump six or seven feet, or certainly drown, it is surprising what 'a hell of a long way' even older people can jump.

expected, well suited to Germany's guerrilla

She was one of America's few female architects of stature, designer of a revered house in Farmington, which she named Hill-Stead.