San Francisco

“I don't believe that there is a blasé person in the State. Credit that to the earthquake. The catastrophe, too, will be a great factor in the future greatness of San Francisco, just as the fires of London were in the making of that city a world metropolis."”

“If I do go to heaven, I'm going to do what every San Franciscan does who goes to heaven. He looks around and says, "It ain't bad, but it ain't San Francisco."”

“Isn't it nice that people who prefer Los Angeles to San Francisco live there?”

“Such was life in the Golden Gate:'We all must eat our peck of gold.”

“I'd thought it would be something like [London], only more. Somehow I expected them all to own their own little shops, because I heard they'd all bought out blocks. I expected them all to be nice and clean and friendly and happy.”

“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 of the late afternoon of time.”

“East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State.”

“San Francisco is not so much a city as a myth. It is in the United States but not of it. It is so civilized, it would starve to death if it didn't get a salad fork or the right wine. It fancies itself Camelot but comes off more like Cleveland. Its legacy to the world is the quiche. People speak in whole sentences, and polysyllabically. It suffers from a superiority complex.”

“As many of you know, I come from San Francisco. We don't have a lot of farms there. Well, we do have one — it's a mushroom farm, so you know what that means.”

“If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.”

“I was appalled that the San Francisco ethic didn't mushroom and envelope the whole world into this loving community of acid freaks. I was very naive.”

“A city on hills has it over flat-land places. . . . This gold and white acropolis rising wave on wave against the blue of the Pacific sky was a stunning thing, a painted thing, like a picture of a mediaeval Italian city which can never have existed.”

“The winds of the Future waitMy cool, grey city of love.”

“At the end of our streets is sunrise;At the end of our streets the stars.”

“Say this prayer every night, and if it works, we'll live forever: "Dear Lord, whose mercy's not diminished, let me live till the airport's finished."”