California Quotes

“Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze.”

Lots of mothers wishing that these days, while their sons walk to California, where rain comes, and the color green doesn’t seem like such a miracle, and hope rises daily, like sap in a stem. And I think, some day I’m going to walk there too, through New Mexico and Arizona and Nevada. Some day, I’ll leave behind the wind, and the dust and walk my way West and make myself to home in that distant place of green vines and promise.

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gambler” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen” and he would have meant the same thing.”