Augusten Burroughs Quotes

War is the easiest photography in the business. Just get close, be lucky, know how your camera works. There are subjects everywhere. Everyplace you go, there is something to photograph in a war, like being in the middle of a hurricane or a train crash or an earthquake. You can't miss it.

The first light of day today revealed what we had feared. The devastation is greater than our worst fears. It's just totally overwhelming.

So, you wrecked Alcatraz Island, made Mount St. Helens explode, and displaced half a million people, but at least you're safe." "Yep, that pretty much covers it.

The inconveniences we faced within this state are minor compared to... New Orleans.

One day, when we were coming back from school, we saw this big cloud of smoke coming up, and all these fire-trucks in the yard. The garage was burning down. I was 14, and we'd lost everything.

Haiti looks like a bomb hit it.

We have witnessed the most extraordinary devastation. The magnitude of the situation is unbelievable. It's just heartbreaking.

It was the first time I was looking, really, right after the storm, that I saw maybe the amount of devastation that had happened in the Lower Ninth Ward. Where my friends lived, which was about six blocks from where the industrial canal was, houses was smashed into houses, and there were, like, four houses smashed together.

We are living even now among punishments and ruins.

The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.

The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

Wars break things; they break stories.

What's taken God 200 years to create was wiped out in a couple of days by what was apparently an arsonist, And it just shows you what a sick world we live in nowadays.

The day I was born, my house burnt down; the day I left home, the Twin Towers burnt down; and I lived in a jungle in India at 15.

We've lost our city. I fear it's potentially like Pompeii.

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

I saw my hometown burning that day.

War! War! War! I fear it will swallow up everything good and useful.

In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, hundreds of thousands have been left homeless, displaced, and broken.

It is useless to live on burned ruins.

In 1874, Mary Fraser accompanied her husband Hugh to Hong Kong, arriving hours after a typhoon had wrecked the island. Some 10,000 boat families had drowned in the harbour. There was no way to avoid the bloated bodies, and when Mary disembarked, she felt her foot land on something soft.

...they came to see what happened to their town, to see if it was indeed lying burnt and bleeding. Many of them also came to die.

Death and worse happened on the plains.

Clearly, I see it. I was just about to leave when I found her kneeling there. A mountain range of rubble was written, designed, erected around her. She was clucthing at a book.

When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand--a center of gravity.