Erik Larson (author) Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

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
Great murderers, like great men in other walks of activity, have blue eyes.

Erik Larson
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
Chicago has disappointed her enemies and astonished the world

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

Erik Larson
No one cared what St. Louis thought, although the city got a wink for pluck.

Erik Larson
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
Why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow.

Erik Larson
Dodd continued to hope that the murders would so outrage the German public that the regime would fall, but as the days passed he saw no evidence of any such outpouring of anger...

Erik Larson