Isaac's Storm Quotes

“People seemed to believe that technology had stripped hurricanes of their power to kill. No hurricane expert endorsed this view.”
― Erik Larson, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

“Time lost can never be recovered...and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.”
― Erik Larson, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

“Once, in a time long past when men believed they could part mountains, a very different building stood in the Wal-Mart’s place, and behind its mist-clouded windows ninety-three children who did not know better happily awaited the coming of the sea.”
― Erik Larson, 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, 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, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

“Mark Twain, merciless as always, parodied the government’s efforts: “Probable northeast to southwest winds, varying to the southward and westward and eastward, and points between, high and low barometer swapping around from place to place, probably areas of rain, snow, hail, and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes, with thunder and lightning.”
― Erik Larson, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

“meridian”
― Erik Larson, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

“Time lost can never be recovered,” he said, “and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.”
― Erik Larson, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

“Dunwoody had been one of General Hazen’s most ardent critics, objecting at every opportunity to Hazen’s investment in scientific research. He would turn up again years later, in Cuba, doing his best to obstruct the efforts of Cuban meteorologists to transmit warnings about the hurricane of 1900 as it advanced through the Caribbean.”
― Erik Larson, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

“sounds that sleeping houses make,”
― Erik Larson, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

“I have examined the laws of the United States carefully and I do not find any law which says that a white man shall be punished for killing a Chinaman.”
― Erik Larson, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

“Some critics argued men should not try to predict the weather, because it was God’s province; others that men could not predict the weather, because men were incompetent.”
― Erik Larson, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

“Isaac, at this point, still considered Moore a personal friend. It hurt him, no doubt, that Moore had distorted the story of his experience in the storm. Isaac had lost his wife and home, and had nearly lost a daughter, but Moore could not be bothered with the actual details.”
― Erik Larson, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

“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.”
― Erik Larson, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

“the first officer, it seemed as if the ship were caught at the convergence of two storms, a gale from the north and a hurricane from the east, that together produced a tornado. Menard agreed.”
― Erik Larson, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

“the station.”
― Erik Larson, 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, 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, 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, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History