Ottimista San Francisco Quotes

Bruce Miller, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, studies elderly patients with a relatively common form of brain disease called frontotemporal dementia, or FTD. He's found that in some cases where the FTD is localized on the left side of the brain, people who had never picked up a paintbrush or an instrument can develop extraordinary artistic and musical abilities at the very end of their lives. As their other cognitive skills fade away, they become narrow savants. ~ Joshua Foer

But of course there's no logic to San Francisco generally, a city built with putty and pipe cleaners, rubber cement and colored construction paper. It's the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new crayons ~ Dave Eggers

Captain John Sommers joined his brother and sister in the library, Do you remember Jacob Todd?
-The cad who defrauded us with that yarn about missions in Tierra del Fuego? asked Jeremy Sommers.
-The same ... He changed his name. Now he calls himself Jacob Freemont, and he's a newspaperman in San Francisco.
-Egad! So it is true that in the United States any scoundrel may begin a new life?
-Jacob Todd paid for his offense several times over. I think it is splendid that there is a country where a man can have a second chance. ~ Isabel Allende

This is one Hart that you will not leave in San Francisco. ~ Gary Hart

Lily liked the fog, and didn't even mind the cold wind. She reckoned that Ocean Beach, the dunes there, and the Sunset were the closest San Francisco was going to come to the foreboding, wind-swept moors of England, where she had aspired to suffer romance and heartache when she was a kid. The foghorn, however, rather than a lonesome lament that conjured images of Heathcliff's dark figure, waiting with clenched jaw on the moor for her to bring light and warmth into his life, sounded like a distressed moose tied up in her neighbor's garage, having his nut sack singed with jumper cables at a precise interval calculated to keep her from falling asleep. Which, in turn, made her think of what complete douche bags people could be when all you wanted to do was borrow a defibrillator. Then she was awake and angry. ~ Christopher Moore

San Francisco,
September 13, 1915

Don't buy the horse unless you are sure it is gentle. I do not want you hurt while I am gone or any other time for that matter. ~ Laura Ingalls Wilder

In college, I stopped doing pre-med and went into theater, and then I moved to San Francisco and lived there for five years. ~ Mark Waters

America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans.
Everywhere else is Cleveland. ~ Tennessee Williams

San Francisco lags behind other communities in providing a vital, vibrant and ecologically sustainable urban canopy, as well as open space in the city. ~ Gavin Newsom

I expected Los Angeles to be slick and modern, but overall it had a rundown look and feel to it. Sort of like Denver. Sort of like every city in America I've lived in, except San Francisco, which looks cool. ~ Gary Reilly

To a traveler paying his first visit, [San Francisco] has the interest of a new planet. It ignores the meteorological laws which govern the rest of the world. ~ Fitz Hugh Ludlow

I once recommended [in a San Francisco Chronicle column] that a third arm - a plastic arm - be sewn at the base of the spine so that people could have a tripod to sit on while waiting in line, and it was taken seriously. ~ Alan Abel

For 25 years, it has been my privilege to represent the city of San Francisco and the great state of California; to work to strengthen our vibrant middle class; to secure opportunity and equality. ~ Nancy Pelosi

How it feels to me, and I guess to you as well, is that the present moves from the past to the future, like a tiny spotlight, inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere along the road from New York to San Francisco. In other words, it is overwhelmingly probable that you are dead. ~ Richard Dawkins

The way the San Francisco Bay's sun rises and falls ... It's splendor beauty is God's gift to us all. It's glorious colors brings great joy to me ... wish forever there my love and I could be. Peace and love in side of me it always brings. For whenever I see it's majestic sky ... My Heart Sings! ~ Timothy Pina

As many of you know, I came 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. ~ Nancy Pelosi

All those summer drives, no matter where I was going, to a person, a project, an adventure, or home, alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow. The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easier to recall than to describe. Sometimes I thought of my apartment in San Francisco as only a winter camp and home as the whole circuit around the West I travel a few times a year and myself as something of a nomad (nomads, contrary to current popular imagination, have fixed circuits and stable relationships to places; they are far from beign the drifters and dharma bums that the word nomad often connotes nowadays). This meant that it was all home, and certainly the intense emotion that, for example, the sequence of mesas alongside the highway for perhaps fifty miles west of Gallup, N.M., and a hundred miles east has the power even as I write to move me deeply, as do dozens of other places, and I have come to long not to see new places but to return and know the old ones more deeply, to see them again. But if this was home, then I was both possessor of an enchanted vastness and profoundly alienated. ~ Rebecca Solnit

I went to school at the San Francisco Art Institute, thinking I was going to become an art teacher. Within the first six months I was there, I was told that I couldn't be an art teacher unless I became an artist first. ~ Annie Leibovitz

It wasn't until I went to college and met different people from different areas of life - and then went to San Francisco and met people who really knew who the hell they were - that I kind of caught up in a hurry. ~ Patton Oswalt

God, San Francisco was such a thief. A lady of the night, a sorceress with her hands out. Every time, all my years as a child, that we crossed the bridge, we had to pay to get in, pay to get out, pay for every little thing. Oakland was free, San Francisco was not. Pay me, pay me. Pay for the Pacific Ocean and the beach. I am expensive, the city always said, so pay me for my wonderful dark treats like the Steinhart Aquarium, with its dark wide hall lit up by tank after tank of bright gold green blue sharks dolphins whales stinger fish, cold-eyed still-as-a-corpse fish that didn't blink or budge when we tapped the thick glass with our fingernails. Pay, the voice said, to whomever took us on Saturday to the Fleischacker Zoo ... the hand of San Francisco reaches out to grab your stupid little nickels and dimes. Pay. Even as I stood in front of the Fat Lady, whose cackling gap-toothed twelve-feet-high, three-feet-wide body made me laugh for a solid hour, even as I collapsed in tears driven out of my eyes by laughter, I understood that the other name for San Francisco wasn't Frisco; it was pay you dumb jerks from Oakland pay. ~ Judy Juanita

I was born in San Francisco. I was raised in Oakland, so I'm, like, super Bay Area born, and, you know, it's just really multicultural up there, and there's a lot of subcultures just from, like, anything, like from rockabilly to, like, crazy punk scenes to, you know, a huge rap scene, and there's just all kinds of things you can do out there. ~ Kreayshawn

From the beginning, there was so much pressure in the early San Francisco punk scene for everyone to be different than everyone else, to flaunt your intelligence and insights instead of every band sounding alike, like what plagues punk music in particular today. ~ Jello Biafra

When I went to get my master's in creative writing at San Francisco State after Grinnell, I joined the moribund remnants of the Actor's Workshop, until I saw Kay Hayward and Sandy Archer in the San Francisco Mime Troupe and drove down that day to audition. The rest is history. ~ Peter Coyote

Louis Kelso of San Francisco, a lawyer-economist, has for years felt that he has a radical answer to the problem. ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

We're crazy about this city. Los Angeles? That's just a big parking lot where you buy a hamburger for the trip to San Francisco. ~ John Lennon

Nereus spun and expanded, turning into a killer whale, but I grabbed his dorsal fin as he burst out of the water.
A whole bunch of tourists went, "Whoa!"
I managed to wave at the crowd. Yeah, we do this every day here in San Francisco. ~ Rick Riordan

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

When I was 19 years old, I hitchhiked across the country to San Francisco. ~ John Prendergast

She dreamed of driving off bridges: into a lake beneath some twisting highway of her youth, into the reservoir on the country road to home, into the San Francisco Bay. ~ Shannon Celebi

New Orleans is one of the two most ingrown, self-obsessed little cities in the United States. (The other is San Francisco.) ~ Nora Ephron

In San Francisco, Halloween is redundant. ~ Will Durst

a flesh-and-blood waiter and therefore as rare in San Francisco as a flying horse, ~ Christie Golden

I was staying in a hotel in San Francisco for a couple of nights, before flying back to the UK. My hotel was a desperate grey block made from paper and people's screams. At night the sound of strangers having icy sex echoed off the building and poured through the broken air conditioning, like tiny daggers I couldn't see, reminding me of just the tip of what I was missing. ~ Craig Stone

If we don't preserve the natural resources, you aren't going to have a sustainable society. This is not something for Chez Panisse and the elite of San Francisco. It's for everyone. ~ Alice Waters

Fear is one of the persistent hounds of hell that dog the footsteps of the poor, the dispossessed, the disinherited. There is nothing new or recent about fear - it is doubtless as old as the life of man on the planet. Fears are of many kinds - fear of objects, fear of people, fear of the future, fear of nature, fear of the unknown, fear of old age, fear of disease, and fear of life itself. Then there is fear which has to do with aspects of experience and detailed states of mind.

Our homes, institutions, prisons, churches, are crowded with people who are hounded by day and harrowed by night because of some fear that lurks ready to spring into action as soon as one is alone, or as soon as the lights go out, or as soon as one's social defenses are temporarily removed.

The ever-present fear that besets the vast poor, the economically and socially insecure, is a fear of still a different breed. It is a climate closing in; it is like the fog in San Francisco or in London. It is nowhere in particular yet everywhere. It is a mood which one carries around with himself, distilled from the acrid conflict with which his days are surrounded. It has its roots deep in the heart of the relations between the weak and the strong, between the controllers of environment and those who are controlled by it.

When the basis of such fear is analyzed, it is clear that it arises out of the sense of isolation and helplessness in the face of the varied dimensions of viole ~ Howard Thurman

Jae Smith is Nightwatch and I have her! Ha! I know where she lives, where she hangs out, and her blood type! Man, I am a dinkum stalker!"
Jeremy sat up, intrigued.
"What stalker site did you go on?" He asked wonderingly asJacob shoved clothes into a bag and grabbed a few protein bars from his dusty, sticky nightstand.
"Facebook. I have to get to San Francisco. ~ Amanda Lee Knauss

The Adoption When Paul Jobs was mustered out of the Coast Guard after World War II, he made a wager with his crewmates. They had arrived in San Francisco, where their ship was decommissioned, and Paul bet that he would find himself a wife within two weeks. He was a taut, tattooed engine mechanic, six feet tall, with a passing resemblance to James Dean. But it wasn't his looks that got him a date with Clara Hagopian, a sweet-humored daughter of Armenian immigrants. It was the fact that he and his friends had a car, unlike ~ Walter Isaacson

In all my travels I have never seen the hospitality of San Francisco equalled anywhere in the world. ~ Conrad Hilton

Like so many other San Franciscans whose paycheck isn't tied to an app or a private bus ride to the Peninsula, you wait to see what tomorrow brings and try to stay steadfast. ~ Oscar Villalon

Glanced up and saw a pair of kites, red with long blue tails, soaring in the sky. They danced high above the trees on the west end of the park, over the windmills, floating side by side like a pair of eyes looking down on San Francisco, the city I now call home. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Although the flagship brand, Pepsi-Cola, has always been second to Coca-Cola, the Frito-Lay division is ten times larger than its largest competitor, Diamond Foods, Inc., of San Francisco. Its products take up whole aisles at Walmart. ~ John Seabrook

The first job I ever had was right here in San Francisco with Southern Pacific. ~ Steven Burd

Energy manipulation took place completely in mind,same way believing in telepathy caused telepathic abilities to grow STRONGER. ~ Christina Westover

My break was a week long, but we stayed in Rome for three. Afterward we flew to San Francisco, where David's latest project was located; I felt elated, like I'd bypassed Yale and young adulthood and graduated straight into the world. When I recall those first weeks with David among the crumbling buildings of Rome, weeks of feeling deliciously older than old, giddy with my own seriousness, it's probably no accident that I can't think of my life without using the word ruined. ~ Chad Harbach