305 Quotes by Erik Larson

If you cannot give me all that I want – what my heart finds it hard now to breathe without – it is because I am not worthy. I know instinctively you could give it if I were – and if you understood, – understood the boy’s heart that is in me and the simplicity of my need, which you could fill so that all my days would be radiant.

I thought I’d go to a bookstore and see what moved me.

There were parents sailing to rejoin their children, and children to rejoin their parents, and wives and fathers hoping to get back to their own families, as was the case with Mrs. Arthur Luck of Worcester, Massachusetts, traveling with her two sons, Kenneth Luck and Elbridge Luck, ages eight and nine, to rejoin her husband, a mining engineer who awaited them in England. Why in the midst of great events there always seems to be a family so misnamed is one of the imponderables of history.

But Zimmermann surprised him. On Friday, March 2, during a press conference, Zimmermann himself confirmed that he had sent the telegram. “By admitting the truth,” Lansing wrote, “he blundered in a most astounding manner for a man engaged in international intrigue. Of course the message itself was a stupid piece of business, but admitting it was far worse.

In an analogy that would prove all too apt, Max Weber likened the city to “a human being with his skin removed.

As the firm grew, so did the city. It got bigger, taller, and richer; but it also grew dirtier, darker, and more dangerous. A miasma of cinder-flecked smoke blackened its streets and at times reduced visibility to the distance of a single block, especially in winter, when coal furnaces were in full roar.

Lauriat made his first trip in 1873 on one of Cunard’s earliest steamers, the Atlas. His purchases routinely made news. One acquisition, of a Bible dating to 1599, a Geneva, or “Breeches,” Bible – so named because it used the word breeches to describe what Adam and Eve wore – drew nearly a full column in the New York Times.

THE ADMIRALTY’S focus was elsewhere, on a different ship that it deemed far more valuable.

An all-swallowing wave, not unlike a surf comber on a beach, was rushing up the boat deck, enveloping passengers, boats, and everything that lay in its path,” he wrote. A mass wail rose from those it engulfed. “All the despair, terror and anguish of hundreds of souls passing into eternity composed that awful cry.