Quotes About California

California, Royce noted, was a promise, but it was also a struggle for redemption in the face of failure.

Disneyland is a text through which we can look back and reexperience the hopes and fears, the beliefs and illusions, of a postwar generation in the throes of creating the place we know as suburban Southern California.

But the real impetus behind dividing California came from the fact that the state was truly two, and perhaps even four, distinct places: the urbanizing Bay Area and the mining districts; the Far North (one breakaway effort had called for the creation of the state of Shasta in that region); the Central Valley; and a sparsely settled Southern California, significantly Mexican, where ranch life and agriculture predominated.

From the beginning, American California was caught in a paradox of reverent awe and exploitative use.

By 1870, San Francisco, with a population of 149,473, was the tenth largest city in the United States, a remarkable development for a city that did not formally exist in 1846.

Such a hope, such a psychology of expectation, fused the California experience irretrievably onto a dream of better days: of a sudden, almost magical, transformation of the ordinary. Ironically, such an expectation was also reprising the dreams of the Spanish conquistadores, explorers, and maritime adventurers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Spanish quest for El Dorado was now being Americanized with its psychological and mythic hold as powerful as ever.

Had the mission system proved successful—and by the 1830s it had had more than sixty years to do so—a steady stream of Hispanicized Native Americans should long since have been transferring into the civil population of California. This never happened. Either the Indians died off, or they became permanently missionized (which is to say, wards of the Franciscans), or they fled into the interior. Mission culture remained volatile

The gold of California was not under private ownership. It belonged to everyone, provided one could find it, lay legal claim to it, extract it, and get it safely to one or the other of the many assay centers that were now springing up where nuggets could be weighed, valued, and melted into ingots for shipment to San Francisco and New York.

All told, some $594 million in ingots—the equivalent of $10 billion in 2001 dollars—would over the course of the next decade be leaving the goldfields of California for the eastern United States.

Incorporated in June 1861, the Central Pacific Railroad of California was the result of conversations that had begun a year and a half earlier between Judah and four Sacramento businessmen: Collis P. Huntington and his partner Mark Hopkins (hardware), Leland Stanford (groceries), and Charles Crocker (dry goods).

My parents were from a generation where you tended to your own problems, one where psychotherapy was an indulgence. They both came from families where you kept your problems to yourself and got on with life. If Keller was starting to act a little out of the ordinary, wasn't everybody trying to quote-unquote find themselves in Southern California in the early seventies? Not to mention that psychiatry had a cuckoo's-nest edge of paranoia about it.

I grew up in a utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child's paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed. I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure. . . . I grew up in utopia.

I basically left Texas with no money. I was making $3.50 working in some mall, so I didn't have a lot of cash. I took $1 000 and headed to California. Along the way I stopped in Vegas because I had always wanted to see Caesar's Palace. So I stopped there and won $2 500 on a slot machine! It was amazing.

No one acknowledged that she was the one who supported them because a teacher's salary would not cover the cost of living in California

But ours was intended to be a citizen government. It is what of, by and for the people means. And when our most important issue in California is the creation of jobs, I think it's quite helpful to have someone in the U.S. Senate or in the governor's seat who actually knows where jobs come from.

You know, every family and every business in California knows what it means to go through tough times.

The truth is in California you can't build a new manufacturing facility, and businesses are leaving in droves because of bad government policy.

There is nothing remarkable about this 'guac', about any 'guac', and California needs to calm the fuck down.

Dope guac," says some asshole, and I pick up a Dorito and shove it into the guac. There is nothing remarkable about this guac , about any guac , and California needs to calm the fuck down. They're just avocados. Guac is guac and while sometimes it's slimy and disgusting, it's never delicious .

The California crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants.

One of the West's singular migrations--from the Azores to California's Great Central Valley--is given faces and voices in Anthony Barcellos's new novel, Land of Milk and Money . Along with its triumphs, the Francisco family embodies the challenges to an immigrant family in a new land, including the often ignored difficulties posed by success and the loss of the old culture. A must read...

In California everyone goes to a therapist, is a therapist, or is a therapist going to a therapist.

Dean's California--wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors.

The yard was full of tomato plants about to ripen, and mint, mint, everything smelling of mint, and one fine old tree that I loved to sit under on those cool perfect starry California October nights unmatched anywhere in the world.