Quotes About Reconstruction

A friend of mine described it this way: When they were born it was like a meteor landed in our house and blew everything apart. We had to just put all the pieces back.

There are designers who say, 'Oh! I see wallpaper and blue carpet.' I usually start by knocking down walls. 'You thought you just needed some new drapes? Well, guess what: That wall's gotta go.'

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

Reconstruction is the great black hole that remains to be filled. Even experts on the Civil War don't really understand its full significance.

It was the first time I was looking, really, right after the storm, that I saw maybe the amount of devastation that had happened in the Lower Ninth Ward. Where my friends lived, which was about six blocks from where the industrial canal was, houses was smashed into houses, and there were, like, four houses smashed together.

History will judge the war against Iraq not by the brilliance of its military execution, but by the effectiveness of the post-hostilities activities.

Before Mina, my life was like a complicated jigsaw puzzle. Mina's come along and pushed the puzzle upside down onto the floor. I have to start all over again, figuring out where the pieces go. But some of the pieces to the puzzle don't seem to fit the way they used to. The thought terrifies me.

By a Carpenter mankind was made, and only by that Carpenter can mankind be remade.

Getting Richard Norris his new face wasn't easy. For starters, doctors needed a donor who wasn't just a favorable blood match but also had the proper skeletal features and skin color - they calculated only a 14 percent chance they'd find one. Then there was the epic surgery that took a team of 150 people.

I chose a specialty in plastic and reconstructive surgery because it's very rewarding to watch someone with broken bones or bad scars return to normal.

And I don't say that we didn't expect it, but we were pleasantly surprised to see the generosity of their foreign policy; and the generosity of their foreign policy at that moment was expressed through the Marshall Plan.

The utopias built by citizens like Anna Holshouser are not yet on that map. But they should be. [active during 1906 earthquake and fire in SF CA]

Just now I was thinking that I'd died and had to come to life again, had to build up a life myself. Only the new edifice has to be built with the ruins of the old. Or rather, I feel like a tree that has been blasted level with the ground, with only the roots still living. Some even of the roots are dead, some I have to kill, the rest have to grow again somehow.

And one thing, as they sometimes do, led not to another, but shattered a world.

Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to find, or re-erect, a pattern.

But that was too simple: the idea of a man split into two by a dividing axe. Better: a man crushed into a hundred pieces of rubble, vainly trying to remember how they—he—had once fitted together. —

It's just a part of her life. Sewing her world back together again, sometimes even daily.

War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods.

What most people don't seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one.

As physics is a mental reconstruction of material processes, perhaps a physical reconstruction of psychic processes is possible in nature itself.

It generally troubles them [the reformers] not a whit that their remedy implies a complete reconstruction of society, or even a reconstitution of human nature.

The Marshall Plan will go down in history as one of America's greatest contributions to the peace of the world.

Nay, you don't throw away those misplaced beads.. you find them, pick them up and make a new necklace.. probably not as beautiful as you imagined..but wearable nevertheless..

True revolutions ... restore more than they destroy.