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Californiana Quotes

Browse 15 quotes about Californiana.

Californiana Quotes

“My Uber driver in Sacramento was not like my San Franciso Uber from earlier that day at SFO. My SAC Uber driver’s first presdential election was JFK-Nixon (or Eisenhower in 1956) and he was already drawing a Social Security check. "Father Time" overshot my fixed location (twice) and then didn’t listen to the navigation instructions. This guy’s signature move (and totem animal) is a U-Turn, a mile past the original juncture.”

“My grandfather was an architect, and his father, and his father; one of them built houses only for millionaires in California, and that was where the family wealth came from, and one of them was certain that houses could be made to stand on the sand dunes of San Francisco, and that was where the family wealth went.”

“This southern city which seems only peripherally and accidentally America. This city which was once an outpost of Spain and once a region of Mexico. This city webbed with boulevards bearing the names of Spanish psychotics and saints. This incomplete city which seems to have no recognizable past, no ground that could be called unassailably sacred. This incomplete city that speaks of an impending terror.”

“Now the wind begins to stir. They call this a Santa Ana, this wind which comes from the desert beyond the city, unpredictable and fierce, scenting the irradiated night with sagebrush and sand. She takes pleasure in the way it howls through its broken Spanish mouth, shattering leaves, breaking the branches of trees, etching its insistent southern story in a braille of twisted fronds. She enjoys the stillness in the mornings after the winds have passed, after the winds have ripped the palms, made confetti of the pale listless fronds, dragged their anemic sun-drained fronds to the ground. Then the city has been purified. A sense of salt lingers. The calligraphy is obvious. At such moments she understands exactly what God is saying. His voice rises with the clarity of church bells above the debris. And God is saying the party is over.”