Jacksonville Quotes

“We’ll try to be more sympathetic to your hot nemesis problem. Is she a nightmare to work with?” An image popped into John’s head, of him kissing Jessica against the hotel room wall in Jacksonville. He could still feel the softness of her skin and hear her breathy moan as he slid his hand underneath her dress. Hardly the stuff of nightmares. “It’s been… interesting.”

“Nothing truly beautiful without its element of strangeness, nothing whole without its own incongruity, these (Jacksonville-area pioneer house) ruins sand up from the earth in sacred conjunction. These ruins conjoin the earth and the manmade, moving from one to the other and back again. The Browards built their house out of shell and limestone, and limestone forms naturally from the shells and skeletons of miniscule sea creatures over great periods of time. The Browards shaped the earth upright toward the sky. THey shaped it with doorframes and windows and chimneys. THey shaped the earth up around them as a shelter. But shaped earth was always the earth. Now the walls fall back down and join once again the ground, taken over by roots of ferns and weeds and small trees. The house was always the ground, only contained in an upward suspension. The house was always the earth, but brought up into architecture, and now the house that was always the earth crumbles back into the earth and nourishes new green things -- dog fennel and morning glories and palmettoes and cabbage palms and cedars. A true symbol of sacredness of the earth is earth's reclaiming of human ingenuity.”

“If the creek predates the city deep in time, then is it right to identify the creek solely with the city? The city has forgotten the creek, as it's forgotten those who walk its side, but the creek didn't need to be known all that long time before the city ever was. Maybe now Hogan's Creek is too steeped in history to claim an independence grounded in prehistory, because the city has too deeply poisoned it for far too long. Then again, there was all that time the creek flowed and had no name. Without a name you belong solely to yourself.”