City of Refuge Quotes

“And they went off down the street, into the heart of Mardi Gras Day.”
― Tom Piazza, City of Refuge

“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.”
― Tom Piazza, City of Refuge

“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.”
― Tom Piazza, City of Refuge

“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.”
― Tom Piazza, City of Refuge

“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,”
― Tom Piazza, City of Refuge

“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.”
― Tom Piazza, City of Refuge

“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.”
― Tom Piazza, City of Refuge

“Say thank you, he thought. Say it and keep saying it until you believe it.”
― Tom Piazza, City of Refuge

“The life he heard over the phone was his life.”
― Tom Piazza, City of Refuge

“Not manic and hell-bent like New York,”
― Tom Piazza, City of Refuge

“she was practicing a skill that both her parents had acquired as children, a way of maintaining a substitute life”
― Tom Piazza, City of Refuge

“crawfish. Nine guests were already gathered around, squeezing the highly seasoned meat out of the tails, sucking the juice out of the rest of the carcass and then going immediately for another, washing them down with beer and also eating the potatoes and corn on the cob that had been boiled along with the crawfish. It was one of the most ingrained communal rituals in New Orleans, everyone eating from the same horn of plenty, facing one another and talking, talking, talking as they ate, about music they had seen, city politics, the Saints game, which was still going inside, making jokes, making plans, making good-natured trouble.”
― Tom Piazza, City of Refuge

“and you form a map in your heart of all the places that make you so happy,”
― Tom Piazza, City of Refuge