There's something so relentless and foul about Hitler and his people, and the way things progressed from year to year. It just got to me in the strangest way.

Time lost can never be recovered...and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.

Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow. In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black.

Whenever I finish a book, I start with a blank slate and never have ideas lined up.

I like all kinds of music, though I tend to prefer jazz and classics.

I started reading the big histories and the small histories, the memoirs and so forth. At some point, I found the diary of William E. Dodd.

No one cared what St. Louis thought, although the city got a wink for pluck.