[If there is any social dividend from the hurricane, some architects and planners said, it is the view the storm afforded of how the other half lives, the areas that are not in the guidebooks.] We have to get past the standardized image, ... It didn't include any of the poor people - any of those neighborhoods that we only know now because they're filled with water.

The first treatise on the interior of the body, which is to say, the treatise that gave the body an interior , written by Henri De Mondeville in the fourteenth century, argues that the body is a house, the house of the soul, which like any house can only be maintained as such by constant surveillance of its openings. The woman’s body is seen as an inadequate enclosure because its boundaries are convoluted. While it is made of the same material as a man’s body, it has ben turned inside out. Her house has been disordered, leaving its walls full of openings. Consequently, she must always occupy a second house, a building to protect her soul. Gradually this sense of vulnerability to the exterior was extended to all bodies which were then subjected to a kind of supervision traditionally given to the woman. The classical argument about her lack of self-control had been generalized.

Any city that only tries to preserve itself is already dead. The great tragedy would be to embalm New Orleans by simply rebuilding it the way it was.

This is one of the few moments in time in which the entire population of a city can tell you what they miss about it. It's like when people sit around a room wearing black talking about the person who's gone. The French Quarter is probably one of the smallest elements of what people treasure.

An internal breakthrough is a burden, an external one is a blessing.

Washington has become this place that people don't leave. It has become this permanent feudal class.