Quotes from Tom Piazza

In New Orleans the funerals remind us that Life is bigger than any individual life, and it will roll on, and for the short time that your individual life joins the big stream of Life, cut some decent steps, for God's sake.

New Orleanians knew how to turn deprivation into an asset; they had the best gallows humor going, they danced at funerals, they insisted on prevailing.

Go with what is. Use what happens.

In New Orleans, on the other hand, geography and time, food, music, holidays, modes of dress and ways of speaking, are part of an integrated fabric. People dress in certain ways for certain events, and certain foods are eaten on certain days

And so they couldn't have known exactly how despicable a lie it was when the president told the news media later that week that nobody could have predicted the levee breaks.

And they went off down the street, into the heart of Mardi Gras Day.

New Orleans will be the new Las Vegas or, more like it, Atlantic City: a big gaudy façade for all the high-rollers, controlled by mobsters and businessmen who live far, far away and destroy everything they touch

The question is not racial solidarity or class solidarity but a distinction between people who have a soul left and people who have mortgaged their souls for a short-sighted self-gratification—whether

Rarely is the best New Orleans music found in a concert hall where the audience sits separated from the performers by a proscenium

There was a gulf between those who had had their community smashed and their future thrown completely into question, and those for whom life still moved in an intelligible stream. It was not unlike the line that separated those who had come back from the war and those whose lives had been going on continuously while they had been away.

New Orleans music lovers, black, white, young and old, are much more likely to be found in places where they can dance to the music they love, holler encouragement, sing along and, if at all possible, eat and drink at the same time.

Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, once told me that when a brass band plays at a small club back up in one of the neighborhoods, it's as if the audience—dancing, singing to the refrains, laughing—is part of the band.

New Orleans has a mythology, a personality, a soul, that is large, and that has touched people around the world. It has its own music (many of its own musics), its own cuisine, its own way of talking, its own architecture, its own smell, its own look and feel.

The past in New Orleans cohabits with the present to an extent not even approximated in any other North American city.

Today I travel a lot, and when I tell people that I live in New Orleans their expression changes slightly; something in their facial muscles relaxes, something brightens in their eyes, and they smile.

After New York City, where I lived and which I also loved, with its sharp right angles and hard surfaces and fast tempo and endless pavement and soaring vertical walls, a giant video game of the mind at the expense of the body

Functioning in the face of any injustice disfigures you. If it kills you or drives you crazy, you are disfigured, and if you can contain it and channel it and work around it, you are still disfigured.

I didn't know it consciously at that point, but I had stepped into one of the most important lessons that New Orleans offers: Go with what is. Use what happens.

and you form a map in your heart of all the places that make you so happy

their Big Chief, Bo Dollis, would marshal them all together and they would start off down Dryades, with Chief Bo chanting one of the Indian songs accompanied by drums and tambourines, and the whole gang shouting back the antiphonal response.

She had arrived in dirty rags and had cooked up a striking outfit for herself, out of relief donations

People born in New Orleans always go back

people of New Orleans spun a culture out of their lives—a music, a cuisine, a sense of life—that has been recognized around the world as a transforming spiritual force.

be a certain percentage of citizens who will try to strip-mine and suck dry everything they can