quotes for 08.29.05
"The wealth of the world is here unworked gold in the ore. The paradise of the South is here, deserted and half in ruins. I never beheld anything so beautiful and so sad."—Lafcadio Hearn, Life and Letters, 1877.
"I came down here about a month ago and am living in the old French Creole Quarter, the most civilized place I've found in America, and have been writing like a man gone mad ever since I got off the train."—Sherwood Anderson, Letters, 1922, published 1953.
“the French Quarter…was a place to hide. I could piss away my life, unmolested… there was something about that city, though it didn't let me feel guilty that I had no feeling for the things so many others needed. it let me alone… being lost, being crazy maybe is not so bad if you can be that way undisturbed. New Orleans gave me that."—Charles Bukowski, Young in New Orleans
"I liked it from the first: I lingered long in that morning walk, liking it more and more, in spite of its shabbiness, but utterly unable to say then or ever since wherein its charm lies. I suppose we are all wrongly made up and have a fallen nature; else why is it that while the most thrifty and neat and orderly city only wins our approval, and perhaps gratifies us intellectually, such a thriftless, battered and stained, and lazy old place at the French quarter of New Orleans takes our hearts?"—Charles Dudley Warner, "New Orleans" in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, January 1887.
"Outside the window New Orleans, the vieux carré, brooded in a faintly tarnished languor like an aging yet still beautiful courtesan in a smokefilled room, avid yet weary too of ardent ways."—William Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 1927.
"I alight at Esplanade in a smell of roasting coffee and creosote and walk up Royal Street. The lower Quarter is the best part. The ironwork on the balconies sags like rotten lace. Little French cottages hide behind high walls. Through deep sweating carriageways one catches glimpses of courtyards gone to jungle."—Walker Percy, The Moviegoer, 1961.
"Much distortion of opinion has existed... respecting public morals and manners in New Orleans. Divested of pre-conceived ideas on the subject, an observing man will find little to condemn in New Orleans, more than in other commercial cities; and will find that noble distinction of all active communities, acuteness of conception, urbanity of manners, and polished exterior. There are few places where human life can be enjoyed with more pleasure, or employed to more pecuniary profit."—William Darby, A Geographical Description of the State of Louisiana, 1816.
"Here one finds the narrow streets with overhanging balconies, the beautiful wrought-iron and cast-iron railings, the great barred doors and tropical courtyards. Many of these fine houses are more than a century and a quarter old, and they stand today as monuments to their forgotten architects. For it must be remembered that New Orleans was a Latin city already a century old before it became a part of the United States; and it was as unlike the American cities along the Atlantic seaboard as though Louisiana were on another continent.—Federal Writers' Project, New Orleans City Guide, 1938.
"The houses’ chief beauty is the deep, warm, varicolored stain with which time and the weather have enriched the plaster. It harmonizes with all the surroundings, and has as natural a look of belonging there as has the flush upon sunset clouds. This charming decoration cannot be successfully imitated; neither is it to be found elsewhere in America."—Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883.
"I came down here about a month ago and am living in the old French Creole Quarter, the most civilized place I've found in America, and have been writing like a man gone mad ever since I got off the train."—Sherwood Anderson, Letters, 1922, published 1953.
“the French Quarter…was a place to hide. I could piss away my life, unmolested… there was something about that city, though it didn't let me feel guilty that I had no feeling for the things so many others needed. it let me alone… being lost, being crazy maybe is not so bad if you can be that way undisturbed. New Orleans gave me that."—Charles Bukowski, Young in New Orleans
"I liked it from the first: I lingered long in that morning walk, liking it more and more, in spite of its shabbiness, but utterly unable to say then or ever since wherein its charm lies. I suppose we are all wrongly made up and have a fallen nature; else why is it that while the most thrifty and neat and orderly city only wins our approval, and perhaps gratifies us intellectually, such a thriftless, battered and stained, and lazy old place at the French quarter of New Orleans takes our hearts?"—Charles Dudley Warner, "New Orleans" in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, January 1887.
"Outside the window New Orleans, the vieux carré, brooded in a faintly tarnished languor like an aging yet still beautiful courtesan in a smokefilled room, avid yet weary too of ardent ways."—William Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 1927.
"I alight at Esplanade in a smell of roasting coffee and creosote and walk up Royal Street. The lower Quarter is the best part. The ironwork on the balconies sags like rotten lace. Little French cottages hide behind high walls. Through deep sweating carriageways one catches glimpses of courtyards gone to jungle."—Walker Percy, The Moviegoer, 1961.
"Much distortion of opinion has existed... respecting public morals and manners in New Orleans. Divested of pre-conceived ideas on the subject, an observing man will find little to condemn in New Orleans, more than in other commercial cities; and will find that noble distinction of all active communities, acuteness of conception, urbanity of manners, and polished exterior. There are few places where human life can be enjoyed with more pleasure, or employed to more pecuniary profit."—William Darby, A Geographical Description of the State of Louisiana, 1816.
"Here one finds the narrow streets with overhanging balconies, the beautiful wrought-iron and cast-iron railings, the great barred doors and tropical courtyards. Many of these fine houses are more than a century and a quarter old, and they stand today as monuments to their forgotten architects. For it must be remembered that New Orleans was a Latin city already a century old before it became a part of the United States; and it was as unlike the American cities along the Atlantic seaboard as though Louisiana were on another continent.—Federal Writers' Project, New Orleans City Guide, 1938.
"The houses’ chief beauty is the deep, warm, varicolored stain with which time and the weather have enriched the plaster. It harmonizes with all the surroundings, and has as natural a look of belonging there as has the flush upon sunset clouds. This charming decoration cannot be successfully imitated; neither is it to be found elsewhere in America."—Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883.
posted by hellkittennyc at 11:29 AM
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