America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people's rights and their sense of patriotism.

Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.

Something will be there when the flood recedes. We know that. It will be those people now standing in the water, and on those rooftops - many black, many poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And it will be New Orleans - though its memory may be shortened, its self-gaze and eccentricity scoured out so that what's left is a city more like other cities, less insular, less self-regarding, but possibly more self-knowing after today. A city on firmer ground.

America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people's rights and their sense of patriotism.

The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.

My job is to have empathy and curiosity for things that I've never done. Also, I'm a person whom people talk to.

For, how else to seize such an instant? How to shout out into the empty air just the right words, and on cue? Frame a moment to last a lifetime?