quotes = new Array(8); titles = new Array(8); publication = new Array(8); quotes[0] = "There were the houses, there were the boats, there were the gardens untended but still sprouting ungovernable tomatoes and gourds. The memories of gardens. Through the windows I saw pictures of children eating fried fish while their parents made crawfish wave at the camera. I saw pots and pans piled neatly in corners, as if the storm knew they belonged together. The books appeared to have swallowed the water and come alive, briefly flapping around and bumping into one another before dying in place with wings stretched, rigid and brown."; titles[0] = "In the Year of the Storm"; publication[0] = "Harper's Magazine"; quotes[1] = "This was the new part of the city, built over the old cypress swamp. It was easy to go for miles without seeing a tree of significant size casting a shadow. There were some, but they only emphasized the dull weight of the sun on everything else. Nothing could hide in that light: every split beam, every broken sheet of drywall, every plaid living room set taken up by the water, rearranged, and piled up in the center of the house.."; titles[1] = "In the Year of the Storm"; publication[1] = "Harper's Magazine"; quotes[2] = "There was beauty in this abandonment, if only because there is beauty in singularity and symmetry. I'll admit it: I learned to love the destroyed city, to demand nothing of it. The place was miraculous. In the absence of people, it twisted itself in accordance with nature's design, spawned new forms, banished unessential things such as lawns and light after dark. It became again an unknown earth in which anything was possible. An ocher trace of high-water lines marked the border with civilization."; titles[2] = "In the Year of the Storm"; publication[2] = "Harper's Magazine"; quotes[3] = "The abominations were the little walkways lined between perfectly clipped and perfectly dead boxwoods leading up steps to a stoop suspended in the air. The abominations were any of the little hints that this ground had been loved before it was salted. The souls snatched up left the evidence of their existence in the half-made beds spied through broken windows and in the strange, runic graffiti sprayed on the doors by rescuers marking a trail through the emptiness."; titles[3] = "In the Year of the Storm"; publication[3] = "Harper's Magazine"; quotes[4] = "I imagined her standing on her stove, holding her head up. I imagined her holding herself above the water for a long time, into what had become an eerily quiet and abandoned night. I saw her the next morning, watching the sun glint off the ripples and the current moving slowly past her chin and around the doorway into the living room and out the window. She was entirely alone then, there was no one for miles around. I wondered at what point she gave up."; titles[4] = "In the Year of the Storm"; publication[4] = "Harper's Magazine"; quotes[5] = "The cells of the body are cryptic, until they fail or they multiply so rapidly that organs begin to shut down. I am afraid because they are cryptic, which is also the word often used in the scientific literature to describe the most basic problem in the study of subterranean termites: they spend their lives underground until once a year some of them burst free and, no longer controlled by their ancient queen, set off in flight. Unbearably fecund, nature's center breaks and cannot be contained."; titles[5] = "The Swarm"; publication[5] = "Harper's Magazine"; quotes[6] = "It is hard not to think we were somehow built, or evolved, to disturb and sculpt our surroundings to suit us; if not, we must have lost our way long ago, for disturbance is our art and our main preoccupation. Had we been an equilibratory species when we rose up in Africa, we might never have left. But what explains the essential, peripatetic nature of human life and culture, which through time has developed a train of camp followers of great length - invaders like us, moving in our wake like gulls behind a shrimp boat."; titles[6] = "The Swarm"; publication[6] = "Harper's Magazine"; quotes[7] = "I begin yammering to myself and scribbling notes on the back of my hand as I drive. I realize I'm driving dangerously, so I pull over under a power line that crosses the street and watch a skinny rat run along the wire from one side of the street to the other. Two little girls from the neighborhood walk past me on the sidewalk, each gently picking termites out of the other's hair."; titles[7] = "The Swarm"; publication[7] = "Harper's Magazine"; index = Math.floor(Math.random() * quotes.length); document.write("
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