I will be on the look out for you, my dear girl,” he wrote. “You must expect to give yourself up when you come.” For this buttoned-up age, for Burnham, it was a letter that could have steamed itself open.
It’s all right to drill your crew, but why not drill the passengers.
He disliked the social obligations of the captaincy.
No one cared what St. Louis thought, although the city got a wink for pluck.
American political discourse had framed the Jewish problem as an immigration problem. Germany’s persecution of Jews raised the specter of a vast influx of Jewish refugees at a time when America was reeling from the Depression.
The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again.
There were always those passengers who came aboard bearing grudges against the modern age.
If you had to jump six or seven feet or certainly drown, it’s surprising how far even older people will jump.
I always thought a shipwreck was a well-organized affair, but I’ve learned the devil a lot in the last five minutes.
During World War I, Germany had only 25 of its vaunted submarines sailing at any one time.
My prophetic task would be twofold: to stand up to him, and to stand by him. To awaken his conscience, and to salve the pain this would cause him.
My between-books strategy was reading voraciously and on a whim.
Dodd acknowledged Congress’s reluctance to become entangled abroad but added, “I do, however, think facts count; even if we hate them.
There began to appear before my romantic eyes…a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape.
One question that often comes up is why, in this age of blogs and tweets and instant digital communication of all kinds, it still takes so long to publish a book.