California Quotes - Page 22

• Living here in California, I think one of the scariest things about California is the fact that it is rewriting its script and changing constantly and so many people don't know who they will be and who they will be with a year from now.

  Pico Iyer

  Thinking, Years, People

  Source: scottlondon.com

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• I think that foreignness is always with you. Indeed, I find California more foreign to me the longer I live here. In thirty years of living here on and off, it hasn't lost anything of foreignness. If anything, it has gained.

  Pico Iyer

  Thinking, Years, Thirty

  Source: scottlondon.com

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• I like California because it still has the glamour and romanticism and exoticism of a very foreign place. It was the place that when I was young, I was raised on "I Love Lucy" and listening to the Grateful Dead and reading Jack Kerouac. They, to me, were all symbols of this very foreign sense of promise and movement. After all this time here I'm glad I still have it.

  Pico Iyer

  Reading, Grateful, Listening

  Source: scottlondon.com

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• That was in Crescent City, California, up near the Oregon border. I left soon after. But today I was thinking of that place, of Crescent City, and of how I was trying out a new life there with my wife, and how, in the barber's chair that morning, I had made up my mind to go. I was thinking today about the calm I felt when I closed my eyes and let the barber's fingers move through my hair, the sweetness of those fingers, the hair already starting to grow.

  Raymond Carver

  Morning, Moving, Eye

  Raymond Carver (2015). “Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories”, p.219, Vintage

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• When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

  James Crumley

  Spring, Drinking, Heart

  James Crumley (2016). “The Last Good Kiss”, p.10, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

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• As I went walking I saw a sign there And on the sign it said "No Trespassing." But on the other side it didn't say nothing, That side was made for you and me. This land is your land, this land is my land From California to the New York island From the Redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters This land was made for you and me.

  Woody Guthrie

  New York, Journey, Islands

  "This Land Is Your Land" (song) (1956)

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• And before me was the great raw bulge and bulk of my American continent; somewhat far across, gloomy, crazy New York was throwing up its cloud of dust and brown steam. There is something brown and holy about the East; and California is white like washlines and emptyheaded - at least that's what I thought then.

  Jack Kerouac

  New York, Crazy, Clouds

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• I've been so thoroughly incorporated into the California culture that I practice meditation and go to a therapist, even though I always set a trap: during my meditation I invent stories to keep from being bored, and in therapy I invent stories to keep from boring the psychologist.

  Isabel Allende

  Practice, Bored, Meditation

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• It was a splendid population - for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home - you never find that sort of people among pioneers - you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material. It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day - and when she projects a new surprise the grave world smiles as usual and says, "Well, that is California all over.

  Mark Twain

  Home, Names, Rushing

  Mark Twain (2017). “Mark Twain, the Globetrotter: Complete Travel Books, Memoirs & Anecdotes (Illustrated Edition): A Tramp Abroad, The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, Old Times on the Mississippi, Life on the Mississippi, Following the Equator & Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion, With Author’s Biography”, p.999, e-artnow

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• So when he asked about getting high, I didn't think, I agreed. We smoked some good California green. Took three tries to put me in the place he said I should be.

  Ellen Hopkins

  Marijuana, Thinking, Trying

  Ellen Hopkins (2012). “Ellen Hopkins: Crank Trilogy”, p.74, Simon and Schuster

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• 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.

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  Beach, Children, School

  Kim Stanley Robinson (2013). “Pacific Edge: Three Californias”, p.300, Orb Books

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• But I also hoped that [she] had chosen California because she thought that was her true home, the place where she really belonged, where it was always warm and you could dance in the rain, pick grapes right off the vines, and sleep outside at night under the stars.

  Jeannette Walls

  Stars, Rain, Sleep

  Jeannette Walls (2009). “The Glass Castle: A Memoir”, p.276, Simon and Schuster

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• Best way to live in California is to be from somewheres else.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Way To Live, Way, Best Way

  Cormac McCarthy (2007). “No Country for Old Men”, p.233, Vintage

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• In these fast and fickle times, it’s nice to know that there are some things you can always count on: the enduring brilliance of the last page of The Great Gatsby; the near-religious harmonies of the Beach Boys’ “California Girls”; and the lifelong friendship of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

  Sarah Vowell

  Girl, Beach, Religious

  Sarah Vowell (2003). “The Partly Cloudy Patriot”, p.174, Simon and Schuster

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• I know California isn't a real destination. You can't get there from New Jersey, not simply by following a line drawn on a map. The process of arrival is more subtle and complex. It involves acts of contrition. You must appease the gods. You must find novel forms of penance. You must tattoo your children and look at the wonder. It's about conjuring and awakening and intuitions you wish you never had.

  Kate Braverman

  Tattoo, Children, Real

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• There's no place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California.

  Roberto Bolano

  Girl, College, Feet

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• "There is one bright side to this," said Fang. "Yeah? What's that?" The new and improved Erasers would mutilate us before they killed us? He grinned at me so unexpectedly I gorgot to flap for a second and dropped several feet. "You looove me," he crooned smugly. Holding his arms out wide, he added, "You love me this much." My shriek of appalled rage could probably be heard in California, or maybe Hawaii.

  James Patterson

  Max, Hawaii, Arms

  "Maximum Ride: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports (Maximum Ride, Book 3)". Book by James Patterson, May 29, 2007.

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• Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

  Don DeLillo

  Heart, Fire, Erosion

  Don DeLillo (2011). “White Noise”, p.77, Pan Macmillan

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• As best I could make out, having never heard the term until I arrived in California, being a WASP meant being mossbacked, lockjawed, rigid, humorless, cold, charmless, insipid, less than penetratingly bright, but otherwise---and inexplicably---to be envied.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Cold, Wasps, Term

  Kay Redfield Jamison (2014). “An Unquiet Mind: A memoir of moods and madness”, p.26, Pan Macmillan

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• Looking at the sky last night and the moon in the first fresh dark, just a few stars, bright with their cold flares, I had a little crumpled thought, 'Oh well, the moon. It's just another place like California.' One's imagination drags its feet as we are inexorably hauled into the future.

  James Schuyler

  Stars, Dark, Moon

  James Schuyler, Nathan Kernan (1997). “The diary of James Schuyler”, Black Sparrow Pr

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• I wanted to hear what she was saying. I wanted to smell that burnt midnight again, I wanted to feel that wind. It was a secret wanting, like a song I couldn't stop humming, or loving someone I could never have. No matter where I went, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California.

  Janet Fitch

  Song, Wind, Smell

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• Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!) Lana Turner has collapsed! I was trotting along and suddenly it started raining and snowing and you said it was hailing but hailing hits you on the head hard so it was really snowing and raining and I was in such a hurry to meet you but the traffic was acting exactly like the sky and suddenly I see a headline LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED! there is no snow in Hollywood there is no rain in California I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up

  Frank O'Hara

  Party, Rain, Love You

  Frank O'Hara (2014). “Lunch Poems: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.64, City Lights Books

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• Nearly all runners do their slow runs too fast, and their fast runs too slow." Ken Mierke says. "So they're just training their bodies to burn sugar, which is the last thing a distance runner wants. You've got enough fat stored to run to California, so the more you train your body to burn fat instead of sugar, the longer your limited sugar tank is going to last." -The way to activate your fat-burning furnace is by staying below your aerobic threshold--your hard-breathing point--during your endurance runs.

  Christopher McDougall

  Running, Distance, Breathing

  Christopher McDougall (2010). “Born to Run: The hidden tribe, the ultra-runners, and the greatest race the world has never seen”, p.207, Profile Books

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• There's a man who's been out sailing In a decade full of dreams And he takes her to a schooner And he treats her like a queen Bearing beads from California With their amber stones and green He has called her from the harbor He has kissed her with his freedom He has heard her off to starboard In the breaking and the breathing Of the water weeds While she was busy being free

  Joni Mitchell

  Weed, Dream, Queens

  Song: Cactus Tree

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• [Lennie meets Joe - he works out that she was named after John Lennon] I nod. "Mom was a hippie." This is northern Northern California after all - the final frontier of freakerdom. Just in the eleventh grade we have a girl named Electricity, a guy named Magic Bus, and countless flowers: Tulip, Begonia, and Poppy - all parent-given-on-the-birth-certificate names. Tulip is a two-ton bruiser of a guy who would be the star of out football team if we were the kind of school that has optional morning meditation in the gym

  Jandy Nelson

  Girl, Mom, Football

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