“After the storm the city lies becalmed. It is a sunny morning, still and cold. Branches litter the streets like broken limbs. People clear away the wreckage. They swarm around like ants whose anthill has been scuffed; how doggedly they rebuild their lives.”

“Cold has a thousand ways of moving in the world: on the sea it gallops like a troop of horses, on the countryside it falls like a swarm of locusts, in the cities like a knife-blade it slashes the streets and penetrates the chinks of unheated houses.”

“After the storm, many citizens left New Orleans to live elsewhere, but those who stayed were determined to rebuild. They loved their city.”

“Love is like that tree. Every storm it breaks, but when the storm is over and the sky has cleared it is never broken.”

“On Sunday mornings, as the dawn burned into day, swarms of gulls descended on the uncollected trash, hovering and dropping in the cold clear light.”

“...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.”