Erik Larson famous quotes

05-15-2025

His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.
-- Erik Larson

#Evil #Weakness #Belief
I thought I'd go to a bookstore and see what moved me.
-- Erik Larson

#Bookstores #Moved
I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold.
-- Erik Larson

#Secret #Chicago #Cold
It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root. This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history.
-- Erik Larson

#Taken #Dark #Roots
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. In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black.
-- Erik Larson

#Book #Men #Cities
Reading Mission to Paris is like sipping a fine Chateau Margaux: Sublime!
-- Erik Larson

#Reading #Paris #Sublime
Reading is such a personal thing to me. I'd much rather give someone a gift certificate to a bookstore, and let that person choose his or her own books.
-- Erik Larson

#Book #Reading #Giving
The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again.
-- Erik Larson

#Adults #Intermittent
Chicago has disappointed her enemies and astonished the world
-- Erik Larson

#Enemy #Chicago #World
. . . why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow.
-- Erik Larson

#Men #Sorrow #Impossible
Time lost can never be recovered...and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.
-- Erik Larson

#Letters #Lost #Should
I don't listen to music when I write, but I do turn on appropriate music when I read portions of my manuscripts back to myself - kind of like adding a soundtrack to help shape mood.
-- Erik Larson

#Writing #Shapes #Helping
I was never concretely aware of the extent of anti-Semitism in the United States and in the upper levels of the State Department.
-- Erik Larson

#United States #Levels #Anti Semitism
I'm very perverse. If someone tells me I have to read a book, I'm instantly disinclined to do so.
-- Erik Larson

#Book
Whenever I finish a book, I start with a blank slate and never have ideas lined up.
-- Erik Larson

#Book #Ideas #Blank
There's something so relentless and foul about Hitler and his people, and the way things progressed from year to year. It just got to me in the strangest way.
-- Erik Larson

#Years #People #Way
Hitler was such an anomalous character - he was so over-the-top chaotic in his approach to statesmanship, his manner and in the violence which overwhelmed the country initially. I think diplomats around the world... felt like something like that simply would not be tolerated by the people of Germany.
-- Erik Larson

#Country #Character #Thinking
I started reading the big histories and the small histories, the memoirs and so forth. At some point, I found the diary of William E. Dodd.
-- Erik Larson

#Reading #Diaries #Bigs
I pride myself on having a journalistic remove.
-- Erik Larson

#Pride
I like all kinds of music, though I tend to prefer jazz and classics.
-- Erik Larson

#Jazz #Kind #All Kinds
Leaves hung in the stillness like hands of the newly dead.
-- Erik Larson

#Hands #Hung #Stillness
No one cared what St. Louis thought, although the city got a wink for pluck.
-- Erik Larson

#Cities #No One Cares #Pluck
Place has always been important to me, and one thing today's Chicago exudes, as it did in 1893, is a sense of place. I fell in love with the city, the people I encountered, and above all the lake and its moods, which shift so readily from season to season, day to day, even hour to hour.
-- Erik Larson

#Lakes #Cities #People
Germans grew reluctant to stay in communal ski lodges, fearing they might talk in their sleep. They postponed surgeries because of the lip-loosening effects of anesthetic. Dreams reflected the ambient anxiety. One German dreamed that an SA man came to his home and opened the door to his oven, which then repeated every negative remark the household had made against the government.
-- Erik Larson

#Dream #Home #Sleep
Great murderers, like great men in other walks of activity, have blue eyes.
-- Erik Larson

#Eye #Men #Blue
I was born with the devil in me,' [Holmes] wrote. 'I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.
-- Erik Larson

#Inspiration #Devil #Facts
Beneath the stars the lake lay dark and sombre," Stead wrote, "but on its shores gleamed and glowed in golden radiance the ivory city, beautiful as a poet's dream, silent as a city of the dead.
-- Erik Larson

#Beautiful #Dream #Stars

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