Quotes from Erik Larson

Murder was a fascination as always.

Once built, the Montauk was so novel, so tall, it defied description by conventional means. No one knows who coined the term, but it fit, and the Montauk became the first building to be called a skyscraper.

As a reminder to himself and anyone who visited his office in the shanty, Burnham posted a sign over his desk bearing a single word: RUSH.

He's like a man who's married a whore: he knows she's a whore, but he loves her just the same.

Göring to smoke while in the cockpit. Hitler, however, forbade him from being photographed while he smoked, fearing the influence such publicity might have on the morals of German youths.

All I hope is that it is not too late... I am very much afraid that it is. But we can only do our best, and give the rest of what we have - whatever there may be left to us.

At intervals as he rounded the room he would stop "to release some priceless quotation or thought." During one such pause, Churchill likened a man's life to a walk down a passage lined with closed windows. "As you reach each window, an unknown hand opens it and the light it lets in only increases by contrast the darkness of the end of the passage." He danced on.

During heavy rains, river water flowed in a greasy plume far out into Lake Michigan, to the towers that marked the intake pipes for the city's drinking water.

The Lusitania remained a passenger liner, but with the hull of a battleship.

A Grape-Nuts ad dealt with warfare, but of the schoolyard variety, extolling the cereal's value in helping children prevail in fistfights: "Husky bodies and stout nerves depend—more often than we think—on the food eaten.

It was magnificent and terrible: the spasmodic drone of enemy aircraft overhead; the thunder of gunfire, sometimes close sometimes in the distance; the illumination, like that of electric trains in peace-time, as the guns fired; and the myriad stars, real and artificial, in the firmament. Never was there such a contrast of natural splendor and human vileness.

Pamela's husband, Randolph, newly minted member of Parliament, missed the birth. He was in London, in bed with the wife of an Austrian tenor, whose monocled image appeared on cigarette trading cards.

It's not the bombs I'm scared of any more, it's the weariness," wrote a female civil servant in her Mass-Observation diary—"trying to work and concentrate with your eyes sticking out of your head like hat-pins, after being up all night. I'd die in my sleep, happily, if only I could sleep.

He disliked the social obligations of the captaincy.

Unhappily, it depends upon the attitude of a single submarine commander whether America will or will not declare war.

In his last moments, she said, he had run his fingers over his bedding as if playing the piano. "Do you hear that?" he whispered. "Isn't it wonderful? That's what I call music.

They will breed either dislike or a slave mentality—(Rebellion in War time being out of the question!)

Oh, so many things swarmed in my thoughts," she wrote; "and yet each time I was with him I felt the charm of his presence.

Turner, that day, was master of one of the great greyhounds of the North Atlantic—and looked the part.

Later, a passenger reported seeing a woman giving birth in the water. The idea that this might have been his mother would haunt the boy for the rest of his life.

During World War I, Germany had only 25 of its vaunted submarines sailing at any one time.

My prophetic task would be twofold: to stand up to him, and to stand by him. To awaken his conscience, and to salve the pain this would cause him.

Always remember, Clemmie, that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.

We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down.