Wendell Pierce Quotes

The storm came. Lives were washed away. Ancient pains resurfaced. Now it is time for a sea of change.

The hurricane flooded me out of a lot of memorabilia, but it can't flood out the memories.

After Katrina, no one was the same. People, relatives, they were dying one after another.

It took me a long time to write again because Katrina destroyed the home I loved, and that robbed me of hope.

When everything in a person's life is gone, ripped-out gone, it's not that you stay empty for so long, so you replace it with something else very quickly.

Think of a lifeless forest in which a small plant pushes its head upward, out of the ruin. In our grief process, we are moving into life from death, without denying the devastation that came before.

There is a tomorrow after a disaster, and it's sometimes hard to remember that in the midst of it.

The disasters of war can be infinitely eerie and poignant.

My favorite day was Monday, September the 25th, 2006. New Orleans, Louisiana, site of the Superdome. I watched our people who had suffered so grievously through Hurricane Katrina fill a stadium hours before a game and stay hours after the game.

Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

Those who survived the San Francisco earthquake said, 'Thank God, I'm still alive.' But, of course, those who died, their lives will never be the same again.

People who live through transplants or disasters like Sept. 11 are survivors.

I'm in a great rage now, as I understand how many lives we have lost.

My family and I survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005; we left my grandmother's flooding house, were refused shelter by a white family, and took refuge in trucks in an open field during a Category Five hurricane. I saw an entire town demolished, people fighting over water, breaking open caskets searching for something that could help them survive.

We salvage the bones of our lives every day, through small tragedies and big tragedies.

We can see loss as something missing, but that missing space can be filled with something else, and that creates healing.

I've been through so much, especially coming from New Orleans where there was Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I had to pick up. We had to move, make new friends, and I think my family was just strong for me as well because we had to start completely over again.

I was watching the news that day when the bulletin came on that my father had been shot. I prayed. I asked God, 'Please don't let my daddy die.'

The only thing tragedy gives us is the opportunity to rebuild our life.

I think it [my first heartbreak] probably just taught me that you will always heal. That this too shall pass. The first time you feel that sort of pain, you think it's never going to go away. Once you do survive it, you realize you can survive anything.

My grandmother told me once that when you lose somebody you think you've lost the whole world as well, but that's not the way things turn out in the end. Eventually, you pick yourself up and look out the window, and once you do you see everything that was there before the world ended is out there still. There are the same apple trees and the same songbirds, and over our heads, the very same sky that shines like heaven, so far above us we can never hope to reach such heights.

And I hope she does not live in a dark world. Because even the most terrible loss doesn't have to make you darker; it can make you deeper.

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.

So to really be able to dive into what does it mean to be broken by an experience, and I developed it just through research and talking and understanding the truth of what it means to lose everything.