San Francisco Quotes

“It's an odd thing, but anyone who disappears
is said to be seen in San Francisco.
It must be a delightful city and possess
all the attractions of the next world.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Belize: Hell or heaven?

[Roy indicates "Heaven" through a glance]

Belize: Like San Francisco.

Roy Cohn: A city. Good. I was worried... it'd be a garden. I hate that shit.

Belize: Mmmm. Big city. Overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up catty corner to that. Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth, fierce gusts of gritty wind, and a gray high sky full of ravens.

Roy Cohn: Isaiah.

Belize: Prophet birds, Roy. Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian, and diamond-colored cowspit streamers in the wind. And voting booths.

Roy Cohn: And a dragon atop a golden horde.

Belize: And everyone in Balencia gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ain't there.

Roy Cohn: And Heaven?

Belize: That was Heaven, Roy.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“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

“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”
― Mark Twain

“Hey!" I turned, crossing my arms and glaring. "I was talking to him!"

Tybalt eyed me with amusement, which just made me glare harder. "No, you were inciting him to stab you with a toothpick. Again, the difference is small, but I think it matters.”
― Seanan McGuire, A Local Habitation

“When I was a child growing up in Salinas we called San Francisco “the City”. Of course it was the only city we knew, but I still think of it as the City, and so does everyone else who has ever associated with it. A strange and exclusive work is “city”. Besides San Francisco, only small sections of London and Rome stay in the mind as the City. New Yorkers say they are going to town. Paris has no title but Paris. Mexico City is the Capital.

Once I knew the City very well, spent my attic days there, while others were being a lost generation in Paris. I fledged in San Francisco, climbed its hills, slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts. In a way I felt I owned the City as much as it owned me.

San Francisco put on a show for me. I saw her across the bay, from the great road that bypasses Sausalito and enters the Golden Gate Bridge. The afternoon sun painted her white and gold---rising on her hills like a noble city in a happy dream. A city on hills has it over flat-land places. New York makes its own hills with craning buildings, but 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 medieval Italian city which can never have existed. I stopped in a parking place to look at her and the necklace bridge over the entrance from the sea that led to her. Over the green higher hills to the south, the evening fog rolled like herds of sheep coming to cote in the golden city. I’ve never seen her more lovely. When I was a child and we were going to the City, I couldn’t sleep for several nights before, out of busting excitement. She leaves a mark.”
― John Steinbeck

“I suppose in about fortnight we shall be told that he has been seen in San Francisco. It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I've never been somewhere I belonged, but there are places where I think I could be happy. Like San Francisco. Well, do art museums count? Because I feel like I belong in them.”
― Heather Demetrios, I'll Meet You There

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

“I have seen purer liquors, better segars, finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier courtesans here in San Francisco than in any other place I have ever visited; and it is my unbiased opinion that California can and does furnish the best bad things that are available in America.”
― Hinton Helper

“This other time, Attikol had the streets of San Francisco rearranged just so this lady's favorite show The Streets of San Francisco would be more accurate.”
― Rob Reger, The Lost Days

“a man was found floating dead in the San Francisco bay. a note in his pocket read: I won't jump if someone smiles at me today.”
― Aditi Babel, Unsettled

“What about San Francisco?"
"What about it?"
"Did you like it?"
She shrugged. "It was O.K."
"Just O.K.?"
She laughed. "Good God!"
"What?"
"You're all alike here."
"How so?" he asked.
"You demand adoration for the place. You're not happy until everybody swears undying love for every nook and cranny of every precious damn --"
"Whoa, missy."
"Well, it's true. Can't you just worship it on your own? Do I have to sign an affadavit?"
He chuckled. "We're that bad, are we?"
"You bet your ass you are.”
― Armistead Maupin

“Doomed to Hell. Every last one of you.”
― June Ahern, The Skye in June

“In the wee small hours, California Highway One north of Half Moon Bay is about as desolate as it gets. The narrow, twisting road was etched from sheer cliff faces that towered above me on the right and dropped away a hundred feet to the Pacific Ocean on my left.

A soggy wool blanket of San Francisco's famous fog hung a few feet above the roadway, obscuring the stars and dribbling tiny spots of mist on my windshield. My headlights bored through the gap between road and fog, drilling an endless tunnel through the darkness.

So far as I could tell, there were only two other cars on the entire planet that night—actually, one car and a produce truck. They'd flashed by, one after the other, heading south just past Moss Beach. Their headlights glared in my eyes and made the road seem even narrower, but half an hour later, I was wishing for more signs of life just to help keep my drooping eyelids from slamming shut altogether. It was the wrong thing to wish for.

She appeared suddenly out of the fog on the opposite side of the road. Only, she wasn't in a car. This gal was smack dab in the middle of the southbound lane and running for all she was worth. She wore a white dress and no coat, and that was about all I had time to take in before she was gone and I was alone in the endless tunnel again.”
― H.P. Oliver, Goodnight, San Francisco

“world is a drama, we are the actors with our play role”
― Michale Callahan, Too Politically Sensitive: Since When Is Murder Too Politically Sensitive

“The only way we know summer is coming is by the more chilling winds, the increased dust, the tawny color of the hills, and the general dying look of things.”
― Caroline C. Leighton, West Coast Journeys: 1865-1879 The Travelogue of a Remarkable Woman

“One soft humid early spring morning driving a winding road across Mount Tamalpais, the 2,500-foot mountain just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, a bend reveals a sudden vision of San Francisco in shades of blue, a city in a dream, and I was filled with a tremendous yearning to live in that place of blue hills and blue buildings, though I do live there, I had just left there after breakfast.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“After the Second World War, San Francisco was the main point of re-entry for sailors returning from the Pacific. Out at sea, many of these sailors had picked up amatory habits that were frowned upon back on dry land. So these sailors stayed in San Francisco . . .”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“However, in this city (San Francisco) that prides itself in being so progressive, it feels like we need to go back and master something both simple as well as incredibly complex – each other. We can learn to embrace our differences without making them a joke or a spectacle.”
― Crystal Sykes

“Paul felt an incisive critique of capitalism coming on and ordered an expensive latte as a distraction. When he tried to pay for the latte, the counter girl waved his money away. This, though Paul, buoyed, will be my city. He left the full price of the drink in the tip jar, $91 left in his pocket.”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“If you ask me, houses shouldn't have been built down here. These little block-long streets cease abruptly at the open space that remains on the side of the hill, and the hill is angry that development has crept so close. It whips these pathetic homes with a battering, constant wind. It sends soggy clouds to sit damply atop the roofs, trickling stagnant moisture, birthing deep green molds. It sends its monsters, the horrifying Jerusalem crickets, up from the soil to invade basement apartments, looking like greasy, translucent alien insects. They drive me crying into the bathroom to strategize their eviction from my home.”
― Michelle Tea

“If you don't think the tech and marketing worlds have less than six degrees of separation from the San Francisco art underground, then you've never seen them camp together at Burning Man. Sometimes they resent and loathe each other, but they still go to some of the same sex parties.”
― Caveat Magister, Turn Your Life Into Art: Lessons in Psychomagic from the San Francisco Underground

“The upper class in San Francisco is that way. The Bohemian Grove that I attend from time to time-the Easterners and the others would come there-but it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, the San Francisco crowd that goes in there. It's just terrible. I mean, I don't even want to shake hands with anybody from San Francisco...You know one of the reasons that fashions have made women look so terrible is because the goddammned designers hate women. Now that's the truth. You watch...some if those fellows, they have the flat-chested thing with horrible looking styles they run. That was really the designers taking it out on the women. I'm sure of that.”
― Richard M. Nixon

“The upper class in San Francisco is that way. The Bohemian Grove that I attend from time to time-the Easterners and the others would come there-but it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, the San Francisco crowd that goes in there. It's just terrible. I mean, I don't even want to shake hands with anybody from San Francisco...You know one of the reasons that fashions have made women look so terrible is because the goddammned designers hate women. Now that's the truth. You watch...some of those fellows, they have the flat-chested thing with horrible looking styles they run. That was really the designers taking it out on the women. I'm sure of that.”
― Richard M. Nixon

“San Francisco is a seesaw proudly bestriding a beautiful bay.”
― Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

“Along Miramonte Drive, shingled buildings in salt-scrubbed pastels bear the names of shops and restaurants that have been there for as long as I can remember, and longer still. Corde's Hardware. Pacific Surf Shop. Bantom Bay Books. Sakura Sushi. Miramonte Pizza. Las Olas Taqueria. I can't help smiling when I spot the cheerful red geraniums and trailing sweet potato vines that spill lavishly from the window boxes of the Shark Bite Café. I planted them myself a couple of years ago, and the cafés owner, Roger, was delighted to find that business ticked up soon after.”
― Meg Donohue, The Memory Gardener

“Beyond a trio of windows, the entire western half of San Francisco fans out like a sequin-strewn, patchwork gypsy skirt in shades of pearl and mauve and moss. The city is bathed in the golden glow of morning sun; the wild band of frothy sea sparkles in the distance. To the north, the bright orange crown of the Golden Gate Bridge spans the bay, majestic in the honeyed light.”
― Meg Donohue, Dog Crazy

“Doesn't everyone have otherworldly experiences? Dreams that feel so real... coincidences too unlikely to explain... a sense that guardian angels or mystical beings are near. Petra Duffey”
― P.L. Cowger, Petra's Quest

“Nonna, there's something else… San Francisco. Sometimes when I walk through the neighborhoods, downtown, past buildings… I think they whisper to me... Petra Duffey”
― P.L. Cowger