Quotes from Chris Rose

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.

A New Orleans credo: When life gives you lemons--make daiquiris.

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

Time is running out for the climate

Do what you do. This Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year's Eve, Twelfth Night, Valentine's Day, Mardi Gras, St. Paddy's Day, and every day henceforth. Just do what you do. Live out your life and your traditions on your own terms. If it offends others, so be it. That's their problem.

If there was no New Orleans, America would just be a bunch of free people dying of boredom. -Judy Deck in an e-mail sent to Chris Rose

I'm not going to lay down in words the lure of this place. Every great writer in the land, from Faulkner to Twain to Rice to Ford, has tried to do it and fallen short. It is impossible to capture the essence, tolerance, and spirit of south Louisiana in words and to try is to roll down a road of clichés, bouncing over beignets and beads and brass bands and it just is what it is. It is home.

Dear America, I suppose we should introduce ourselves: We're South Louisiana...You probably already know that we talk funny and listen to strange music and eat things you'd probably hire an exterminator to get out of your yard. We dance even if there's no radio. We drink at funerals. We talk too much and laugh too loud and live too large and, frankly,we're suspicious of others who don't.

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

A New Orleans credo: When life gives you lemons--make daiquiris.

Everybody here has a story. New Orleans was always a place where people talked too much even if they had nothing to say. Now everyone's got something to say.

He's got that New Orleans thing crawling all over him, that good stuff, that We Are the Champions, to hell with the rest and I'll just start over kind of attitude.

we dance even if there's no radio. we drink at funerals. we talk too much & laugh too loud & live too large, and, frankly, we're suspicious of others who don't.

To be engaged in some small way in the revival of one of the great cities of the world is to live a meaningful existence by default.

This book is dedicated to Thomas Coleman, a retired longshoreman, who died in his attic at 2214 St. Roch Avenue in New Orleans' 8th Ward on or about August 29, 2005. He had a can of juice and a bedspread at his side when the waters rose. There were more than a thousand like him.

Even at the End of Days, there will be lap dancing.

If you cannot improve upon the silence, do not speak.

Like so many others of my tenure and temperament—stubborn ancients, I suppose—web reporting is anathema to everything I love about newspapering: getting a tip, developing leads, fleshing-out the details, then telling the story. Now it stops with the tip. Just verify (hopefully!) and post it. I didn't write stories anymore; I 'produced content.

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.