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
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“For example, if you are fearful your mind will freeze, motion will be stopped and you will be defeated. If your mind is fixed on victory or defeating your opponent, you will be unable to function automatically.”
― quote from Zen in the Martial Arts
“God wants you to get where God wants you to go more than you want to get where God wants you to go.”
― Mark Batterson, quote from In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day: How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars
“A man has usually to work through much mud before he gets his nugget.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from Can You Forgive Her?
“Love of man for woman - love of woman for man. That's the nature, the meaning, the best of life itself.”
― Zane Grey, quote from Riders of the Purple Sage
“Charlotte was used to all the marks of war: the shabbiness of things, bad food, shop queues, posters about the war effort, people with worried faces, people dressed in black. She was used to seeing the wounded men from the hospital with their bright blue uniforms and bright red ties, the colours, she thought, if not the clothes of Arthur's soldiers. Such things did not disturb her, and the war seemed quite remote. But this disturbed her, the grotesque kind of circus that came now. It did not seem remote at all, nor did it fit with her vague ideas of war gained from those books of Arthur's she had read, with their flags and glory and brave drummer boys. How could you dare to become a soldier, knowing that you might end like this? There were men like clowns with white heads, white arms, white legs, men with crutches, slings, and bloodied bandages, and all so distressingly like men you would expect to see walking down the street, two armed, two legged, in hats instead of bandages and suits of black not battered khaki. Some came on stretchers borne by whole and ordinary men, some hobbled and leaned on whole ordinary arms. Most had mud dried thick across their clothes, and all came from the dark station's mouth with the spewings of trains behind, the clankings, thumpings, grindings, the sounds like great devils taking in breaths and blowing them out again.”
― Penelope Farmer, quote from Charlotte Sometimes
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