Quotes from The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast

Douglas Brinkley ·  736 pages

Rating: (2.1K votes)


“Unlike the Marines, who are given macho monikers like “jarheads,” the Coast Guard had long been denigrated in military circles as fey “puddle jumpers.” But just as 9/11 brought a newfound respect to firemen, Katrina did the same for the reputation of the Coast Guard. At the peak of rescue operations they had 62 aircraft, 30 cutters, and 111 small boats stepping up in rescue and recovery operations. They did it all one person at a time.”
― Douglas Brinkley, quote from The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast


“Salt Lake City has a monument to the seagulls, which in 1848 swooped down from the sky to devour a swarm of locusts, thereby saving Utah crops. They were known affectionately as the “Mormon Air Force.” Someday New Orleans should likewise honor the dragonfly. With their large multifaceted eyes, two pairs of strong transparent wings, and outstretched bodies, dragonflies frighten most people. On Tuesday dragonflies blanketed New Orleans, hovering just inches above the smelly floodwater, eating every mosquito in sight.”
― Douglas Brinkley, quote from The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast


“History will remember the Superdome debacle—caused by the dearth of evacuation buses—as “Nagin’s Folly,” mayoral incompetence of the first order.”
― Douglas Brinkley, quote from The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast


“John McPhee’s 1989 book The Control of Nature, for”
― Douglas Brinkley, quote from The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast


“A crooked peace officer is just a damned abomination,” McCarthy wrote. “That’s all you can say about it. He’s ten times worse than the criminal.”48”
― Douglas Brinkley, quote from The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast



About the author

Douglas Brinkley
Born place: in Atlanta, Georgia, The United States
Born date December 14, 1960
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“He's doing some kind of demony witch-craft (demoncraft?), and there is someone's blood all over the place, and do evil murdering demon librarians generally let witnesses to their crimes go running off into the late afternoon to tattle to the world? No. No, they don't.”
― Michelle Knudsen, quote from Evil Librarian


“But Teia had a superpower that no one had counted on: she was completely paranoid. She had thought she was being followed a hundred times since she’d started working for the Order, so she’d figured out a thing or two. One, she was a paranoid mess. Two, she was pretty good at it.”
― Brent Weeks, quote from The Blood Mirror


“A woman would be more intelligent, obviously.”
― Liane Moriarty, quote from The Last Anniversary


“My darling, my child, my connoisseur of sesquipedalian words and convoluted ideas and meandering sentences and baroque images, while the sun is asleep and the moon somnambulant, while the stars bathe us in their glow from eons ago and light-years away, while you are comfortably nestled in your blankets and I am hunched over in my chair by your bed, while we are warm and safe and still for the moment in this bubble of incandescent light cast by the pearl held up by the mermaid lamp, you and I, on this planet spinning and hurtling through the frigid darkness of space at dozens of miles per second, let’s read.”
― Ken Liu, quote from The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories


“A TELEPHONE YOWLED in Chris’s ear, and he scrabbled at his side for a sword that wasn’t there.”
― K.M. Weiland, quote from Dreamlander


Interesting books

The War of the Worlds
(193.4K)
The War of the World...
by H.G. Wells
The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer
(136.1K)
The Unbecoming of Ma...
by Michelle Hodkin
Acheron
(49.5K)
Acheron
by Sherrilyn Kenyon
Lady Chatterley's Lover
(81.3K)
Lady Chatterley's Lo...
by D.H. Lawrence
Much Ado About Nothing
(192.3K)
Much Ado About Nothi...
by William Shakespeare
Dead to the World
(220.4K)
Dead to the World
by Charlaine Harris

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.