Erik larson Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Author: Erik Larson
Quotes of Author: Erik Larson

Erik Larson _ The Devil in the White City:
Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir ine's blood.
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Erik Larson _ The Devil in the White City:
He broke prevailing rules of casual intimacy: He stood too close, stared too hard, touched too much and long. And women adored him for it.
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Erik Larson _ The Devil in the White City:
the club had provided for music was a lone pianist who had no idea what kind of piece might accompany such an exotic dance. Bloom thought a moment, hummed a tune, then plinked it out on the keyboard one note at a time: Over the next century this tune and its variations would be deployed in a succession of mostly cheesy movies, typically as an accompaniment to the sinuous emergence of a cobra from a basket. It would also drive the schoolyard lyric, "And they wear no pants in the southern part of France." Bloom regretted his failure to copyright the tune. The royalties would have run into the millions.
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Erik Larson _ The Devil in the White City:
Dr. Hervey Cleckley described the prototypical psychopath as "a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly. … So perfect is his reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him in a clinical setting can point out in scientific or objective terms why, or how, he is not real.
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Erik Larson _ The Devil in the White City:
Using Holmes's instructions, workmen in the employ of undertaker John J. O'Rourke filled a coffin with cement, then placed Holmes's body inside and covered it with more cement. They hauled him south through the countryside to Holy Cross Cemetery, a Catholic burial ground in Delaware County, just south of Philadelphia. With great effort they transferred the heavy coffin to the cemetery's central vault, where two Pinkerton detectives guarded the body overnight. They took turns sleeping in a white pine coffin. The next day workers opened a double grave and filled this too with cement, then inserted Holmes's coffin. They placed more cement on top and closed the grave. "Holmes' idea was evidently to guard his remains in every way from scientific enterprise, from the pickling vat and the knife," the Public Ledger reported. Strange things began to happen that made Holmes's claims about being the devil seem almost plausible. Detective Geyer became seriously ill. The warden of Moyamensing prison committed suicide. The jury foreman was electrocuted in a freak accident. The priest who delivered Holmes's last rites was found dead on the grounds of his church of mysterious causes. The father of Emeline Cigrand was grotesquely burned in a boiler explosion. And a fire destroyed the office of District Attorney George Graham, leaving only a photograph of Holmes unscathed.
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Erik Larson _ In the Garden of Beasts: Love,
Throughout that first year in Germany, Dodd had been struck again and again by the strange indifference to atrocity that had settled over the nation, the willingness of the populace and of the moderate elements in the government to accept each new oppressive decree, each new act of violence, without protest.
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Erik Larson _ The Devil in the White City:
Chicago's population had topped one million for the first time, making the city the second most populous in the nation after New York, although disgruntled residents of Philadelphia, previously in second place, were quick to point out that Chicago had cheated by annexing large expanses of land just in time for the 1890 decadal census. Chicago shrugged the sniping off. Big was big. Success today would dispel at last the eastern perception that Chicago was nothing more than a greedy, hog-slaughtering backwater; failure would bring humiliation from which the city would not soon recover, given how heartily its leading men had boasted that Chicago would prevail. It was this big talk, not the persistent southwesterly breeze, that had prompted New York editor Charles Anderson Dana to nickname Chicago "the Windy City.
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Erik Larson _ The Devil in the White City:
All were wealthy and at the peaks of their careers, but all also bore the scars of nineteenth-century life, their pasts full of wrecked rail cars, fevers, and the premature deaths of loved ones.
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Erik Larson _ The Devil in the White City:
At first alienists describes this condition as "moral insanity" and those who exhibited the disorder as "moral imbeciles." They later adopted the term "psychopath"."
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Erik Larson _ In the Garden of Beasts: Love,
The Death of Boris,' by Mussorgsky?
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Erik Larson _ In the Garden of Beasts: Love,
Hitler had just announced his decision to withdraw Germany from the League of Nations and from a major disarmament conference that had been under way in Geneva, off and on, since February 1932.
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Erik Larson _ In the Garden of Beasts: Love,
Thomas Wolfe wrote, "Here was an entire nation … infested with the contagion of an ever-present fear. It was a kind of creeping paralysis which twisted and blighted all human relations.
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