Nine Lives Quotes

“That was the point of Mardi Gras, was it not? To serve and honor all the people, to bring into hard lives a touch of royalty and grandeur....To put on a spectacle such as this, free of charge, was an honor. New Orleans was sick and wounded, but no other city in the world had a celebration quite like this. It was beautiful precisely because it was so frivolous.”
― Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans

“But this home over here: it needed paint but had flowers neatly planted all the way around it. That one over there had a tire swing out front, tied to a fat magnolia tree. Behind another, a lush vegetable garden. You got to fight not to give into despair, he told himself. You got to see the good that's mixed in with the bad.”
― Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans

“In New Orleans, no matter how much money you had in the bank, you looked on poverty every day.”
― Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans

“Other people's children went off to college, which for years Ronald had interpreted as a positive thing. Lately, though, he wasn't so sure. The children who went off to college hardly ever came back. It was as though the hard work of getting that college degree bent them out of shape, focused them too much on their own personal achievement. Once you got that degree, it was all about getting ahead in that monetized struggle, and they forgot the community that raised them. Ooh, live in the Lower Nine; not me. Ooh, do a day's work with your hands; I won't touch that. The neighborhood gained something when one of its children went off to become a doctor or an engineer, but it lost something, too.”
― Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans

“New Orleanians are notoriously late showing up, if they show up at all, because by and large they don't keep calendars. Calendars are tools for managing the future, and in New Orleans the future doesn't exist.”
― Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans

“Life in New Orleans is all about making the present--this moment, right now--as pleasant as possible. So New Orleanians, by and large, aren't tortured by the frenzy to achieve, acquire, and manage the unmanageable future. Their days are built around the things that other Americans have pushed out of their lives by incessant work: art, music, elaborate cooking, and--most of all--plenty of relaxed time with family and friends. Their jobs are really just the things they do to earn a little money; they're not the organiing principle of life. While this isn't a worldview particularly conducive to getting things done, getting things done isn't the most important thing in New Orleans. Living life is. Once you've tasted that, and especially if it's how you grew up, life everywhere else feels thin indeed.”
― Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans

“Anybody could rise above anything in America. ...
No, they can't, Marie said, from the backseat. How was I supposed to break out of there? What were my people going to say? Uppity. That's what. 'Cause if I can, why can't they? But I tell you what, I don't even know how it's done. I never seen nobody do it.”
― Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans

“Dead people rot on the streets of New Orleans for a week and a half so the feds can sign a private contract.”
― Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans

“How many bodies were floating around, and how many more would die? Not the uptown swells with cars, second homes, and wallets full of credit cards, but those who had no car, no friend with a car, those who’d never left New Orleans and weren’t about to flee just because the mayor said to go.”
― Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans