Lawrence N. Powell > Quotes

“Public truth telling is a form of recovery, especially when combined with social action. Sharing traumatic experiences with others enables victims to reconstruct repressed memory, mourn loss, and master helplessness, which is trauma's essential insult. And, by facilitating reconnection to ordinary life, the public testimony helps survivors restore basic trust in a just world and overcome feelings of isolation. But the talking cure is predicated on the existence of a community willing to bear witness. 'Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships,' write Judith Herman. 'It cannot occur in isolation.”
― Lawrence N. Powell, Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana

“New Orleans developed into something greater than a mere entrepôt for a continent. It became a state of mind, built on the edge of disaster, where the lineages of three continents and countless races and ethnicities were forced to crowd together on slopes of the natural levee and somehow learn to improvise a coexistence whose legacy may be America’s only original contribution to world culture.”
― Lawrence N. Powell, The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans

“Sometime in the 1920s or 1930s, a Cajun trapper reportedly found the tablet La Salle had buried near the river’s mouth in 1682. Unable to make sense of its Latin inscription, he melted the lead into fishing weights and buckshot. 21”
― Lawrence N. Powell, The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans