Erik Larson Quotes

You think your life is going one way and then suddenly, you're on another track.

This has been the best thing that ever happened to me.

But whenever history is in the making, there's some kind of intangible feeling.

In every life there is a turning point. A moment so tremendous, so sharp and clear that one feels as if one's been hit in the chest, all the breath knocked out, and one knows, absolutely knows without the merest hint of a shadow of a doubt that one's life will never be the same.

Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.

When you want something so bad and when something great happens, I think it's instinct that you say, 'This is gonna be the moment that's gonna change everything. Everybody is gonna see me a different way.'

In terms of writing about horses, I fell backwards into that. I was intent on getting a Ph.D., becoming a professor, and writing on history but I got sick 14 years ago when I was 19. Getting sick derailed that plan completely.

Going through that traumatic time of being heartbroken and then being pregnant turned my whole life upside down and inside out and just knocked the wind out of me. But I got so much out of that.

'Yogi Bear' changed my life in ways that I can't explain because it's not a full feature on me. 'Yogi Bear' - there's everything before 'Yogi Bear,' and there's everything after 'Yogi Bear.' Like a major car accident, or the birth of Christ.

I met my wife, Margaret L. Mack, at the University of Chicago. We were married in 1936. She died in 1970.

When I started my program... there was a big clock in the corner and I looked and it said nine o'clock exactly. And it was funny, because when I was standing on the podium, it said exactly 10 p.m., and this whole hour had changed my life.

I was headed in the wrong direction. I didn't think I'd make it to 21. My Uncle Chuck saved my life. He was a graphic designer, and he gave me my first sketchbook. In the front, he wrote, 'Wear it like your underwear.'

A life can get knocked into a new orbit by a car crash, a lottery win or just a bleary-eyed consultant giving bad news in a calm voice.

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

Anyone I know who's almost died has come out of it, at least for a while, looking at things differently.

It was the defining event and remains a thousand degrees hot.

Once a century the world is divided into before and after.

The ideal 'New Yorker' profile is a person, an interesting person, at a critical point in his life.

My parents were actors. And so I was born in New York City, and when I was 7, they quit acting and went back to medical school at the University Of Chicago.

I came to the University of Chicago on the morning of January 2, 1932. I wasn't yet a graduate of high school for another few months. And that was about the low point of the Herbert Hoover/Andrew Mellon phase after October of 1929. That's quite a number of years to have inaction.

I remember, I was at the house with my oldest son and I got that call from Johnny Ace. You know that call. Johnny was the guy that hired me, fired me and hired me back, which was kind of cool. But I was just fired, everything stopped, my whole world stopped.

'Breathless' was an important milestone in my life.

It's not a secret. Everybody knows that it was a special place for me there when I was playing with the Eagles. I started there, they kinda changed my life for the better.

2010 was a magical year and was unforgettable.

I was really grateful to have a chance to have some really in-depth study about the power of language using a philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago by the name of Paul Ricoeur. I'm really happy to be in Chicago because a lot of what I do is rooted in his approach to language.