Quotes About California

This process, one of trading the state to outside owners in exchange for their (it now seems) entirely temporary agreement to enrich us, in toher words the pauperization of California, had in fact begun at the time Americans first entered the state, took what they could, and, abetted by the native weekness for boosterism, set about selling the rest.

All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears.

The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way.

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.

because in at least one respect California—the California we are talking about—resembles Eden: it is assumed that those who absent themselves from its blessings have been banished, exiled by some perversity of heart. Did not the Donner-Reed Party, after all, eat its own dead to reach Sacramento?

It is hard to find California now, unsettling to wonder how much of it was merely imagined or improvised; melancholy to realize how much of anyone's memory is no true memory at all but only the traces of someone else's memory, stories handed down on the family network.

This was a California girl, and she was raised on a history that placed not much emphasis on why. She was never an idealist, and this pleased no one. She was tainted by survival. She came back from the other side with a story no one wanted to hear, a dispiriting account of a situation in which delusion and incompetence were pitted against delusion and incompetence of another kind, and in the febrile rhythms of San Francisco in the midseventies it seemed a story devoid of high notes.

If you're the type of person who has to fulfill your dreams, you've gotta be resourceful to make sure you can do it. I came out to California when I was 21, thinking my New York credentials would take me all the way. I came back home a year later all dejected and a failure.

There's a group in California that wants to make suicide a capital offense punishable by death. That's like punishing someone for being on a hunger strike by sending them to bed with no supper.

I wouldn't mind to go to New Mexico with you. To California with you. But mainly to New Jersey, to see the sea where you grew up.

With a thick note of disbelief in her voice, Jilly said, 'You went through the wall to California?' [Dylan] 'Yeah. Why not? Where'd you think we went-Narnia? Oz? Middle Earth? California's weirder than any of those places, anyway.' Page 246

morning that Lupo and Hamal pull back the curtain to reveal to Katie that California can be Hell on Earth.

Like a pair of looms, using sunshine and their own silhouettes, two enormous California live oaks wove veils of gold and purple, which they flung across the driveway.

Dick Dale and the Deltones, the Beach Boys, the Ventures, Santo & Johnny, the Chantays, Jan and Dean for nostalgic background music.

Like most modern art, they interested her no more than did the wind-tangled rain-compacted sun-bleached trash that time accumulated in vomitous-looking masses along California's cracked and potholed highways, as the once-golden state stewed in government corruption on its way to bankruptcy.

But come to California. Come to these canyons if you want to be driven by sacredness into the air. If you dream of the true, clear silences, if you want those silences to sing - come to California.

I'd rather be in prison in California than free anywhere else.

House. The man who had left California in 1854, penniless and under a cloud, to return to his wife in St. Louis, arrived in San Francisco on a September day in 1879 to such tumult and shouts as the youthful city had never known. This time Julia stood by his side, their two-year Odyssey ended,

California, that advance post of our civilization, with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life... its flavourless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried rooted in tradition and character.

Don't get me wrong. Sacramento is a lovely place, particularly for those with a fondness for methamphetamines. For the meth-addled, Sacramento had conveniently placed a Greyhound bus station just yards from the statehouse where Austria's finest was sworn in as governor of the great state of California.

In 1846, George Donner and his brother Jacob, Illinois farmers, set out for the promise of California in covered wagons with several families, including their own. They took a shortcut that turned out to be a longer route, hit bad weather, ran out of food, and resorted to cannibalism (yes, that means eating each other). Only a few members of the party survived.

I love California; I practically grew up in Phoenix.

A good example of this technique is found in the work of the Shyness Clinic, a program based in Los Altos, California

I always got a kick out of it when they called it the California Sound because it really came out of Liverpool and Greenwich Village.