Erik Larson · 336 pages
Rating: (36.4K votes)
“Time lost can never be recovered...and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.”
― Erik Larson, quote from Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
“This is the story of Isaac and his time in America, the last turning of the centuries, when the hubris of men led them to believe they could disregard even nature itself.”
― Erik Larson, quote from Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
“People seemed to believe that technology had stripped hurricanes of their power to kill. No hurricane expert endorsed this view.”
― Erik Larson, quote from Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
“No one ever remembered a nice day. But no one ever forget the feel of paralyzed fish, the thud of walnut-sized hail against a horse's flank, or the way a superheated wind could turn your eyes to burlap.”
― Erik Larson, quote from Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
“No sir,” Dunwoody snapped. “It cannot be; no cyclone ever can move from Florida to Galveston.”
― Erik Larson, quote from Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
“a butterfly in a West African rain forest, by flitting to the left of a tree rather than to the right, possibly set into motion a chain of events that escalates into a hurricane striking coastal South Carolina a few weeks later?”
― Erik Larson, quote from Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
“CAPT. J. W. SIMMONS, master of the steamship Pensacola, had just as little regard for weather as the Louisiana’s Captain Halsey. He was a veteran of eight hundred trips across the Gulf and commanded a staunch and sturdy ship, a 1,069-ton steel-hulled screw-driven steam freighter built twelve years earlier in West Hartlepool, England, and now owned by the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company. Friday morning the ship was docked at the north end of 34th Street, in the company of scores of other ships, including the big Mallory liner Alamo, at 2,237 tons, and the usual large complement of British ships, which on Friday included the Comino, Hilarius, Kendal Castle, Mexican, Norna, Red Cross, Taunton, and the stately Roma in from Boston with its Captain Storms. As the Pensacola’s twenty-one-man crew readied the ship for its voyage to the city of Pensacola on Florida’s Gulf Coast, two men came aboard as Captain Simmons’s personal guests: a harbor pilot named R. T. Carroll and Galveston’s Pilot Commissioner J. M. O. Menard, from one of the city’s oldest families. At”
― Erik Larson, quote from Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
“But the sound frightened Isaac. The thudding, he knew, was caused by great deep-ocean swells falling upon the beach. Most days the Gulf was as placid as a big lake, with surf that did not crash but rather wore itself away on the sand. The first swells had arrived Friday. Now the booming was louder and heavier, each concussion more profound.”
― Erik Larson, quote from Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
“Stand with your back to the wind,” he said, “and the barometer will be lower on your left than on your right.”
― Erik Larson, quote from Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
“One of the deadliest storm surges in American history occurred on Lake Okeechobee in Florida, in 1928, when hurricane winds blowing across the long fetch of the lake raised a storm surge that killed 1,835 people.”
― Erik Larson, quote from Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
“…I relied on an unpublished report by Jose Fernandez-Partagas, a late-twentieth-century meteorologist who recreated for the National Hurricane Center the tracks of many historical hurricanes, among them the Galveston Hurricane. He was a meticulous researcher given to long hours in the library of the University of Miami, where he died on August 25, 1997, in his favorite couch. He had no money, no family, no friends--only hurricanes. The hurricane center claimed his body, had him cremated, and on August 31, 1998, launched his ashes through the drop-port of a P-3 Orion hurricane hunter into the heart of Hurricane Danielle. His remains entered the atmosphere at 28 N., 74.2 W., about three hundred miles due east of Daytona Beach.”
― Erik Larson, quote from Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
“He was a creature of the last turning of the centuries when sleep seemed to come more easily. Things were clear to him. He was loyal, a believer in dignity, honor, and effort.”
― Erik Larson, quote from Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
“Camille’s rain fell with such ferocity it was said to have filled the overhead nostrils of birds and drowned them from the trees.”
― Erik Larson, quote from Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
“If there were a Pulitzer for bleak irony, however, it would go to the News for its Saturday-morning report on one of the most important local stories of the year—the Galveston count of the 1900 U.S. census, which the newspaper had first announced on Friday. The news was excellent: Over the last decade of the nineteenth century, the city’s population had increased by 29.93 percent, the highest growth rate of any southern city counted so far.”
― Erik Larson, quote from Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
“The bureau had long banned the use of the word tornado because it induced panic, and panic brought criticism, something the bureau could ill afford.”
― Erik Larson, quote from Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
“It is,” she wrote, “an unfortunate trait in the human character to assail or asperse others engaged in the performance of humanitarian acts.”
― Erik Larson, quote from Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
“Galveston was too pretty, too progressive, too prosperous—entirely too hopeful—to be true.”
― Erik Larson, quote from Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
“It was truly a transitional moment: There he was, at the cusp of the twentieth century, using the telephone to send a telegram.”
― Erik Larson, quote from Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
Erik Larson
Born place: in Brooklyn, New York, The United States
See more on GoodReads
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
― Carolyn Mackler, quote from The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things
“He was mine, and I'd be damned if I was going to let some other woman have him. I would shove the candlelight up her ass.”
― Abbi Glines, quote from Simple Perfection
“The Delores tank rolled on inexorably, “You get a mortgage to buy a house, a larger mortgage than the previous owner because the price of the house has been artificially increased by the market, which is controlled by the banks. Then you live in the house for a few years paying a lot more in mortgage payments than you would if you were renting a similar property. But hey, you ‘own’ it and can ‘do things to it’… things that cost even more money, by the way… so you maintain its upkeep, improve it with say a new kitchen or bathroom; the more salubrious the neighbourhood the more expensive the kitchen would need to be – a Küche & Cucina, say; impressing your cleaner is very important after all and at the end you sell it to someone else for more than you paid for it so they’ll need an even bigger mortgage. And all the while everyone is paying all this money to the banks and the banks give the money to their shareholders, the biggest of whom are the incredibly rich. This, when you boil it all down, means that you’re taking a large sum out of your wages and passing it across to some rich person to live large, whilst you and others like you struggle to make their monthly payments. Basically you’ve been screwed, Doc, but somehow they’ve convinced you that you own a bit of England, when the truth is you don’t really own anything, you’re just renting it at a higher cost and they can take it back from you any time they want. It’s all just a card trick, Doc. All just ‘smoke and mirrors’ and that’s what’s getting to me.”
― Arun D. Ellis, quote from Corpalism
“Doubt everything [...]. Doubt everything at least once. What you decide to keep, you'll be able to be confident of. And what you decide to ditch, you will replace with what your instincts tell you is true.”
― Amy Plum, quote from After the End
“Vee'd been too busy ogling all the bright, shiny trinkets in the marketplace to notice Jamie shadowing us.Visions or not, he was far too bipolar to be a match for my best friend. She deserved a true prince-not some moody poseur with a crown. Yet, if I knew her, his conflicted Edward Cullen act would her hook faster than meth.”
― Carey Corp, quote from Doon
The High Lord
War and Remembrance
Winter
Feast of Fools
Animal, Vegetable, M...
The DUFF: Designated...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
