Quote by Erik Larson

““As the light began to fade, the architects lit the library’s gas jets, which hissed like mildly perturbed cats.””

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More by Erik Larson

I've heard from the movie marketplace that James Cameron did such a killer job with 'Titanic' that it's almost impossible to do anything better.

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As a rule, I am very skeptical of tying books to anniversaries. I don't think readers care. I also feel that it just about…

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“look as if they had been plucked from the Palace of Versailles or a Jacobean mansion—that you were aboard a ship being propelled far…

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That's what I love about history - nuance. I don't believe in unalloyed heroes. Everyone's got warts, and everyone's got a surprise side.

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“Holmes was charming and gracious, but something about him made Belknap uneasy. He could not have defined it. Indeed, for the next several decades…

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

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“At present," he said, "I am responsible for conveying my associates to a place called Chicago. I understand it is somewhere in the hinterland.”

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I knew from an online search that the Wisconsin State Historical Society, on the vast University of Wisconsin campus, held the papers of Sigrid…

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Dodd continued to hope that the murders would so outrage the German public that the regime would fall, but as the days passed he…

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I envy other writers who claim to have a backlog of books they'd like to write.

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Trying to find ideas is the hardest part of my job. You'd think it would be the most fun. Just sitting around reading whatever…

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“Her blind endorsement of Hitler’s regime first faded to a kind of sympathetic skepticism, but as summer approached,”

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