Best 263 quotes in «new orleans quotes» category

These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.

The wild notes of tuba and trumpet and trombone rattled and hummed through the trees. In the first group of musicians, there were kids as young as fourteen playing the tuba and one kid who probably couldn’t drive banging a bass drum. They stomped together in rhythm to the music. Two ladies had dressed up in what looked like princess outfits. They wore white gloves and socks with tassels.

To remain in the city has required a quick recovery, an erasure with no mourning. No truth or recompense for what has been lost and what was taken. No admission of what we all know to be true: that the worst results of Hurricane Katrina have had nothing to do with Mother Nature.

This was, after all, New Orleans in 1890- the Crescent City of the Gilded Age, where aliases of convenience and unconventional living arrangements were anything but out of the ordinary, at least in certain parts of town. Identities were fluid here, and names and appearances weren't always the best guide to telling who was who.

Those who have not lived in New Orleans have missed an incredible, glorious, vital city--a place with an energy unlike anywhere else in the world, a majority-African American city where resistance to white supremacy has cultivated and supported a generous, subversive, and unique culture of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues, and and hip-hop to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, jazz funerals, and the citywide tradition of red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music and food and traditions and sexuality and liberation.

Time seemed to drag with dreamlike slowness, like a knife through cold honey, and the room took on a surreal golden sheen as if I was looking through that same jar of honey. Maybe at that moment, the sun shone just right though the grimy windows, but the woman, the shelves, the jars, everything in the room appeared in tones of gold and sepia, except for the painting behind the counter. From behind the shopkeeper's head, a fluorescent Mary and Jesus glared at me, their cartoon-like faces reproaching me for being there.

To encapsulate the notion of Mardi Gras as nothing more than a big drunk is to take the simple and stupid way out, and I, for one, am getting tired of staying stuck on simple and stupid. Mardi Gras is not a parade. Mardi Gras is not girls flashing on French Quarter balconies. Mardi Gras is not an alcoholic binge. Mardi Gras is bars and restaurants changing out all the CD's in their jukeboxes to Professor Longhair and the Neville Brothers, and it is annual front-porch crawfish boils hours before the parades so your stomach and attitude reach a state of grace, and it is returning to the same street corner, year after year, and standing next to the same people, year after year--people whose names you may or may not even know but you've watched their kids grow up in this public tableau and when they're not there, you wonder: Where are those guys this year? It is dressing your dog in a stupid costume and cheering when the marching bands go crazy and clapping and saluting the military bands when they crisply snap to. Now that part, more than ever. It's mad piano professors converging on our city from all over the world and banging the 88's until dawn and laughing at the hairy-shouldered men in dresses too tight and stalking the Indians under Claiborne overpass and thrilling the years you find them and lamenting the years you don't and promising yourself you will next year. It's wearing frightful color combination in public and rolling your eyes at the guy in your office who--like clockwork, year after year--denies that he got the baby in the king cake and now someone else has to pony up the ten bucks for the next one. Mardi Gras is the love of life. It is the harmonic convergence of our food, our music, our creativity, our eccentricity, our neighborhoods, and our joy of living. All at once.

Toulouse Street ran one way toward the Mississippi River. Jackson looked over [Imogene's] head into one of those famous New Orleans courtyards, full of lush foliage, mossy brick, secrets, and wonder.

Was I altering the 'space-time continuum' or whatever they called it in time travel movies, just by existing right now? Perhaps I'd accidentally kill a mosquito that might have given some famous person a disease that killed them?

Until the Civil War there was scarcely a man in public life in New Orleans or Louisiana who had not fought at least one duel; most of them had engaged in several.

You can take the people out of the city, but you can't take the soul — that remains here.

We have not erased history; we are becoming part of the city's history by righting the wrong image these monuments represent and crafting a better, more complete future for all our children and for future generations.

We walked the length of Jackson Square, stopping to look at the work of a couple of artists who'd set up their sidewalk shops for the day. "Look." Eugenie stopped in front of an acrylic painting of a mustached man with curly dark hair, hooded eyes, and a big hooked nose. He looked like he'd steal the hubcaps off your grandmother's Cadillac. "It's Jean Lafitte, our most famous pirate," the artist said. "He was quite a character." She had no idea. She also had badly missed the mark on his looks. His hair wasn't that curly, he'd been clean-shaven the whole time I'd known him, his nose was straight and in perfect proportion to the rest of his features, and he didn't have hooded black eyes. Still, he might find it entertaining. "How much?" I asked.

When I see you, Jolie, I see a woman who is far more than she realizes but who will someday grow into her powers. One who is much stronger than those who would trap her inside their cages or try to put her to harness. One with a bold intelligence, with whom I can laugh. One who surprises me." He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was so soft I had to strain to hear. "I see a woman who makes me feel alive again, like a man, and not like a wraith who has lived beyond his usefulness in a world that no longer needs him.

Why did you come to my door?” She wet her lips and whispered, “I promised my friend at work that tonight would be a night of yes.” Her final word carried a breathiness that had his blood rushing to his groin. His voice dropped to a raw growl more than a whisper. “What if I asked if I could kiss you?” Her eyes searched his as she whispered, “Yes.

You don't control their minds, ma fifille, you control their hearts" - Cosette

About fifteen miles above New Orleans the river goes very slowly. It has broadened out there until it is almost a sea and the water is yellow with the mud of half a continent. Where the sun strikes it, it is golden.

You'll be in good hands with the colonel, you'll see." The colonel? Okay, I was obviously stuck in a Gone With the Wind theme park. Or maybe a Kentucky Fried Chicken farm. Or I was simply hallucinating...

You're asking for trouble, woman." At the gruff tone of his voice, I raised my head and met his dark, chocolate-brown eyes, rimmed by long lashes that didn't take an ounce away from his masculinity. I wanted to drown in those eyes. "I like trouble, remember?

Al Gore has a hit movie called 'An Inconvenient Truth.' I have an inconvenient truth for him: you're still not the president. ... This past weekend, Al Gore's movie, 'An Inconvenient Truth,' earned more per screen than any film in the country. ... I dare say Gore's movie is the highest grossing PowerPoint presentation in history. ... Global warming: Can we live with it? ... It is time we did something, namely resign ourselves to doing nothing [on screen: Follow Congress' Lead]. ... For instance, when sea levels rise, we'll just build levees [on screen: Worked for New Orleans]

ACORN is organizing to make sure the job of rebuilding New Orleans is done by the people of New Orleans and truly benefits the communities who have been hurt the most.

Advance warning of Katrina's path was wrested from mute Nature by meteorological calculations and satellite imagery. God told no one of His plans. Had the residents of New Orleans been content to rely on the beneficence of God, they wouldn't have known that a killer hurricane was bearing down upon them until they felt the first gusts of wind on their faces. And yet, as will come as no surprise to you, a poll conducted by The Washington Post found that 80 percent of Katrina's survivors claim that the event only strengthened their faith in God.

A lot of cats in New Orleans, very soulful, very soulful musicians and they assume that they're singers. And they just make that assumption. And so when there's a little intonation problem, people are very forgiving of them because they heard how soulful they play.

An American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi-Gras in New Orleans.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

And I wound up in New Orleans for all those years and it was a great place, really a catalyst creatively.

As a youngster in the little orphanage home in New Orleans, I was the bugler of the institution. When I got to be around 13 or 14 years old, they took me off the bugle and put me in the little brass band.

...as bad as it is here, it's better than being somewhere else." -Chris Rose, regarding life in Post-Katrina New Orleans

Are we going to New Orleans?" "No", she said, backing out of the spot. "We're going to West Virginia." "I assume by 'West Virginia,' you actually mean 'Hawaii,'" I said. "Or some place equally exciting.

As a youngster I worked the river boats going down the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers, pushing barges to Chicago, then all the way down to New Orleans.

Coltrane came to New Orleans one day and he was talking about the jazz scene. And Coltrane mentions that the problem with jazz was that there were too few groups.

At Carnegie Hall the Preservation Hall Jazz Band showed how easily it could hop from era to era. It could work like a rhythm-and-blues horn section or a tightly arranged little big band if need be, but it could also switch back into the polyphonic glories of vintage New Orleans jazz, in which nearly every instrument seems to improvise around the tune at the same time.

Because I had worked the river boats some summers, pushing as far as New Orleans, I joined the Merchant Marine.

Being from North Carolina, it's kind of slow-paced. There's not too much going on there, whereas in New Orleans, there's always something going on. I just love all the people, going out to dinner and enjoying anything I want.

Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now.

But the people cannot have wells, and so they take rain-water. Neither can they conveniently have cellars or graves, the town being built upon "made ground"; so they do without both, and few of the living complain, and none of the others.

At one point, early on, some public figures even asked whether it 'made sense' to rebuild New Orleans. Would you let your own mother die because it didn't make financial sense to spend the money to treat her, or because you were too busy to spend the time to heal her sick spirit?

Barbara Bush has her finger on the pulse of America. Im so glad shes back and more compassionate than ever, ... Thats right, of course people just sat around New Orleans, boring, uninspired, soulless New Orleans, and dreamed of someday relocating to the Astrodome. Oh, dear Lord, if only I could leave my unhappy existence and head on up to wonderful Houston and live with my friends side by side in a spacious football stadium, my life would be so much richer and complete.

By natural means, as the Lord always operates for the accomplishment of his purposes, means so simple that the thoughtless and unbelieving do not see the manifestation of his power, he brought the Puritans from the old world to New England, the Dutch to New York, the English Cavaliers to Virginia and the French to New Orleans, a combination of races which, paradoxical as it may appear, was just calculated to give us the composite America who made the United States of America what it is, the greatest nation of the world today.

How did you fall in love with New Orleans? At once, madly. Looking back, sometimes I think it was predestined.

For a while I was living in New Orleans for like 4, 5 years. I had just come back to town.

Four months after we finished shooting, I'd been in New Orleans shooting another movie and my agent and I were having a bite to eat - actually in London - and he's sitting there and goes, 'Wow, I just can't believe how ripped you are.'

Despite what some people have said, President Bush did not want black people to die in New Orleans. However, he did hope they would not relocate to any areas of Texas that he likes to frequent.

Everybody started calling my music rock and roll, but it wasn't anything but the same rhythm and blues I'd been playing down in New Orleans.

Everything in New Orleans was competitive. People would always be betting on who was the best and the greatest in everything. That's where the battles of music came in.

Exposed! shines a harsh light on the myriad horrors of modern society and reports back from the fearful frontlines with wicked wit and paranoid power. From the murky waters of New Orleans to the scarred psyches of our own image-obsessed existence, Exposed! is the last headline we get to read before reality comes tumbling down.

He learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.

I'd advise you to visit New Orleans before you pass away. I really would. Because if you die without seeing New Orleans, you wasted half your life.

I always like to play very contemporary concepts of swing right next to New Orleans music because it highlights continuum.

If I had grown up in any place but New Orleans, I don't think my career would have taken off. I wouldn't have heard the music that was around this town. There was so much going on when I was a kid.