"Everything in New Orleans is a good idea."
New Orleans quotes
New Orleans
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New Orleans quotes (page 3 of 17)
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"There is a house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun, and it's been the ruin of many a poor boy and God I know I'm one."
"The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. You can't see it, but you know it's here. Somebody's always sinking."
"Something will be there when the flood recedes. We know that. It will be those people now standing in the water, and on those rooftops - many black, many poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And it will be New Orleans - though its memory may be shortened, its self-gaze and eccentricity scoured out so that what's left is a city more like other cities, less insular, less self-regarding, but possibly more self-knowing after today. A city on firmer ground."
"The rest of America, with some small exceptions, has been bulldozed and rebuilt and then bulldozed and rebuilt again. Our places have become interchangeable. Here in New Orleans, everything from the architecture to the way in which people eat, the way in which they talk, the way in which they do business, the way in which they dance, the manner in which everything is set to a parade beat, they're all from here. There's no place like it."
"What city has given the world more in terms of American culture than New Orleans? There is none. Not New York. Not L.A. Not Chicago. Not anywhere, in the sense that African American music has gone around the world twenty times over, and it's continuing to evolve. It is our greatest cultural export."
"New Orleans in an amazing town."
"There is no reason at all why there aren't enough people to guard New Orleans and to help stabilise Baghdad."
"The tax incentives are things the music business can emulate. If I own Yesterday by the Beatles and I go to a bank and try to borrow $10,000 and use that song as collateral, they wouldn't know what to do. They would run me out of the bank. Whereas if we get specialized people who know how to appraise the value of intellectual property like songs, catalogs and master recordings, they know how to put some type of value on it. They have this in Nashville and Los Angeles. New Orleans is just starting to get it."
"It is a cultural tradition that makes New Orleans what it is. It also represents the roots of American music and an important part of the African-American community in New Orleans. It unites people in some of the poorer neighborhoods of the city. It is absolutely critical to continue."
"You could spend your life trying to uncover all the treasures in New Orleans and not even scratch the surface. It's such an amazing place."
"New Orleans is a glorious mutation"
"It is wonderful to hear of the relief efforts that are finally coming to New Orleans and the rest of the region, but as well all know, it is simply not going to be enough."
"There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from its fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce and contain more than half our inhabitants."
"The oyster was an animal worthy of New Orleans, as mysterious and private and beautiful as the city itself. If one could accept that oysters build their houses out of their lives, one could imagine the same of New Orleans, whose houses were similarly and resolutely shuttered against an outside world that could never be trusted to show proper sensitivity toward the oozing delicacies within."
"I've always been shy, but in New Orleans there were times my shyness would cause me actual physical pain. I'd get so claustrophobic around people that I'd bend over from the sickness in my stomach. That's not a good way to be when you're famous, obviously."
"Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety - leaning into it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world."
"I like historical fiction. I fell in love with New Orleans the first time I visited it. And I wanted to place a story in New Orleans."
"I have a love/ hate relationship with the city of New Orleans, which is the strongest kind of relationship."
"I've always had an interest in Louisiana, especially New Orleans."