California Quotes

“Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgandy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“Mirrors on the ceiling,
The pink champagne on ice
And she said 'We are all just prisoners here, of our own device'
And in the master's chambers,
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast

Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
'Relax,' said the night man,
'We are programmed to receive.
You can check out any time you like,
But you can never leave ...”
― The Eagles, Hotel California

“Best way to live in California is to be from somewheres else.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“The two girls grew up at the edge of the ocean and knew it was paradise, and better than Eden, which was only a garden.”
― Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage

“Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really droppped anchor. It was a transient place. People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare. Twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary. Figuratively, literally, metaphorically -- any way you want to look at it -- everbody in L.A. keeps a bag packed. Just in case.”
― Michael Connelly, The Brass Verdict

“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

“I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

“It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“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.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers' bathing suits. It was beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.”
― Michael Connelly, The Black Echo

“It's [Los Angeles] mostly full of nonsense and delusion and egomania. They think they'll be young and beautiful forever, even though most of them aren't even young and beautiful now.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Political corruption, social greed, and Americanized quasi-socialism can ruin even the most wonderful places. California proved that.”
― Tiffany Madison

“Things are tough all over, cupcake, an' it rains on the just an' the unjust alike...except in California.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“Out yonder they may curse, revile, and torture one another, defile all the human instincts, make a shambles of creation (if it were in their power), but here, no, here, it is unthinkable, here there is abiding peace, the peace of God, and the serene security created by a handful of good neighbors living at one with the creature world.”
― Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

“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, Roughing It

“This morning I saw a coyote walking through the sagebrush right at the very edge of the ocean ― next stop China. The coyote was acting like he was in New Mexico or Wyoming, except that there were whales passing below. That’s what this country does for you. Come down to Big Sur and let your soul have some room to get outside its marrow.”
― Richard Brautigan, A Confederate General from Big Sur

“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, Pacific Edge

“I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of “sin"–this sense that it was possible to go "too far”, and that many people were doing it–this was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“What does she do?"
"She's a producer." Of course, in Los Angeles this doesn't mean much more than "she's a member of the human race.”
― Julian Fellowes, Past Imperfect

“Southern California is the land of crazy crimes.”
― Don Carpenter, From a Distant Place

“These are tough times for state governments. Huge deficits loom almost everywhere, from California to New York, from New Jersey to Texas.

Wait—Texas? Wasn't Texas supposed to be thriving even as the rest of America suffered? Didn't its governor declare, during his re-election campaign, that 'we have billions in surplus'? Yes, it was, and yes, he did. But reality has now intruded, in the form of a deficit expected to run as high as $25 billion over the next two years.

And that reality has implications for the nation as a whole. For Texas is where the modern conservative theory of budgeting—the belief that you should never raise taxes under any circumstances, that you can always balance the budget by cutting wasteful spending—has been implemented most completely. If the theory can't make it there, it can't make it anywhere.”
― Paul Krugman

“Los Angeles is a town where status is all and status is only given to success. Dukes and millionaires and playboys by the dozen may arrive and be glad-handed for a time, but they are unwise if they choose to live there because the town is, perhaps even creditably, committed to recognising only professional success, and nothing else, to be of lasting value. The burdensome obligation imposed on all its inhabitants is therefore to present themselves as successes, because otherwise they forfeit their right to respect in that environment ... There is no place in that town for the "interesting failure" or for anyone who is not determined on a life that will be shaped in a upward-heading curve.”
― Julian Fellowes, Past Imperfect

“Max's laugh was like a dragnet; it picked up every living laugh within the vicinity and shined a light on it, intensified it, pitched it higher. It was a dare--he dared you not to laugh with him. He dared you to despair. He dared you to insist that there was no dawn, that all there was was darkness, that there was no silver lining, that the heart didn't grow fonder by absence. He dared you to believe you were going to die--when you at that moment knew, just as he did, that you were immortal, you were among the gods.”
― Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage

“If you've had good gin on a hot day in Southern California with the people you love, you forget Nebraska. The two things cannot coexist. The stronger, better of the two wins.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“We are Bay Aryans from Berkeley: prepare to be reengineered in an attractive range of color schemes for your safety and comfort!”
― Charles Stross, On Her Majesty's Occult Service

“California, still a magical vanity fair.”
― Eileen Granfors

“God will break California from the surface of the continent like someone breaking off a piece of chocolate. It will become its own floating paradise of underweight movie stars and dot-commers, like a fat-free Atlantis with superfast Wi-Fi.”
― Laura Ruby, Bad Apple

“You're not done with L.A. until L.A. is done with you.”
― Philip Elliott, Nobody Move

“Everything in her wanted to run -fly back to California, back to her quiet existence working among strangers. Hiding out in the folds of tree trunks and tropical petals, tucked away safely among so many foreign plants and people.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones