Quotes & Sayings About California

It was one of those decisions that shouldn't have been so easy to get so wrong. Go on your own or take the half wasted waif. She was wearing denim hotpants with a pink vest top, and was hanging off his arm, more for stability than closeness, so he propped her up against the wall next to the counter and reached inside his coat pocket for his badge. It was definitely his badge, he clearly remembered stealing it two years before whilst in California. — Dylan Perry

With his blond hair, broad shoulders, and perpetual tan,
Bryce looked like a California underwear model. Not that I'd thought about him in his underwear.
Much. — Chris Cannon

We're creating these massive urban areas in the Third World. It's like you take the entire population of California and put it in one city. Then you remove basic sanitation and medical services, and you have a ticking biological time bomb. — Richard Preston

In 1991, only two years into the Bush administration, Condoleezza Rice suddenly left her powerful job as the top Russia expert on the National Security Council and went back to California - to get a life. — Elaine Sciolino

If the Sons of Anarchy were based in California, the Grandpas of Anarchy must've headed north to Seattle. — R.S. Grey

The first ads for medical marijuana have started airing on television in California. The ads are quite expensive. It costs a lot of money to buy 30 seconds during 'Spongebob Squarepants.' — Craig Ferguson

I am the grandson of immigrants from Japan who went to America, boldly going to a strange new world, seeking new opportunities. My mother was born in Sacramento, California. My father was a San Franciscan. They met and married in Los Angeles, and I was born there. — George Takei

It had been so long since he'd been tempted that he felt as dry as the Northern California landscape, one spark away from complete devastation. — Annabeth Albert

Myths that need clarification: "Everyone in California lives on a white, sandy beach." False. The only people who live on California beaches are vacationers from Arizona, Utah, and Nevada who own condos. — Erma Bombeck

I grew up with fantastic Southern food. In Southern California. — Nora Ephron

As far as I was concerned, the Panthers were 'baaaaaad.' The Party was more than bad; it was bodacious. The sheer audacity of walking onto the California Senate floor with rifles, demanding that Black people have the right to bear arms and the right to self-defense, made me sit back and take a long look at them. — Assata Shakur

California is a great place to live if you're an orange. — Fred Allen

Me and my brother lived in kind of a shed behind our house, and it was cold. We really lived kind of a dirty existence. It was tough to move away from my father and grandfather in California. I wore socks that were so dirty they were hard and black, and I would go into the lost and found box at school and look for clothes. — Mark Schultz

For years I drove a big Ford F250 pickup. That was my ride because two-thirds of my work was wood work, and I'm always driving up to Northern California, where I harvest salvaged trees. — Nick Offerman

How about this John Kerry controversy? So he's out there in California, tells some kind of joke and it backfires. He's saying he botched the joke ... This guy can lose elections he's not even in. — David Letterman

The Reagans were dear friends for many years, even when he was governor of California. Nancy appreciated a lot of Philippine-made things. — Imelda Marcos

Then you wake up in Barstow California. Another dissociative fugue. It's like time traveling. It's late November now. What ever happened at teresa is a mystery to you. In Godforsaken Barstow, where the golden state shits itself into the desert, people are eatting each other. Has it always been this way? — Lost Zombies

My grandfather was an architect, and his father, and his father; one of them built houses only for millionaires in California, and that was where the family wealth came from, and one of them was certain that houses could be made to stand on the sand dunes of San Francisco, and that was where the family wealth went. — Shirley Jackson

Them white people made hate. They made hate just like they had a formula for it and followed that formula down to the last exact gallon of misery put in. Well ... that's what they made and that's what they got. — J. California Cooper

They would regret that they had not killed him; he would get out of that hole and find Juliana sooner or later, even if he had to pursue her to hell itself. "Oh, you won't have to go that far, we are on our way to California," Diego said in farewell — Isabel Allende

Tucker: I'm glad it happened. because then I got to know who you really are.
Clara: Oh yeah? Who am I?
Tucker: A really, really spiritual, spoiled California chick.
Avery: Shut up.
Tucker: It's cool though. My girlfriend is an angel. — Cynthia Hand

Many scientists have interfered with science in precisely the way courts always worried tissue donors might do. "It's ironic," she told me. "The Moore court's concern was, if you give a person property rights in their tissues, it would slow down research because people might withhold access for money. But the Moore decision backfired - it just handed that commercial value to researchers." According to Andrews and a dissenting California Supreme Court judge, the ruling didn't prevent commercialization; it just took patients out of the equation and emboldened scientists to commodify tissues in increasing numbers. Andrews and many others have argued that this makes scientists less likely to share samples and results, which slows research; they also worry that it interferes with health-care delivery. — Rebecca Skloot

I do very little on-camera acting, so within a phrase as a voice actor you have to know how to convey when someone is 95 years old or 19 years old ... When I was the lead singer of the California Raisins commercials there was a traditional actor there as well and he would do all these body movements without saying anything because he was "acting." And the only acting the microphone picked up on was silence. — Jim Cummings

In my opinion, Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't qualified to be governor of California. — James Garner

I moved from Philadelphia to California when I was 25, after traveling abroad for a year. I thought I'd come home eventually and settle down, but I didn't. — Kelly Corrigan

Everything is drive-through. In California, they even have a burial service called Jump-In-The-Box. — Wil Shriner

The state of California has no business subsidizing intellectual curiosity. — Ronald Reagan

California has rules against assault weapons. It's just those rules are inherently so technical and have to do with cosmetic features, you can easily get around them with any sort of semi-automatic rifle. — Chuck Todd

We have seen the Democrat solution to an energy crisis; it's called California. — J. C. Watts

The Major sits on a log, whittling at an oak branch. I can't tell what he's making, but he goes at it with the same fervor that Nugget and Coney get digging a hole, forgetting the world around them. He's a man with busy hands, that's for sure. He's always carving, hammering, or sewing something. I've seen him create tables and benches, shoes, halters, and even a leather tie necklace for Olive, which he made by boring a hole into a bit of quartz and working the leather strap through. Afterward, he declared himself the finest jeweler in all of Glory, California. — Rae Carson

Nick loved his cousins, they were family after all, and according to his mother, you have to love family. Over the years, he had also noticed that the less he saw them, the more lovable they became. He would really love them if they moved to California. — Shannon Ryan

Ray Bradbury has a vacation house in Palm Springs, California, in the desert at the base of the Santa Rosa mountains. It's a Rat Pack-era affair, with a chrome-and-turquoise kitchen and a small swimming pool in back. — Sam Weller

On the day the park opened, half the state must have turned up. California weddings that June were small in attendance, the bride, groom, and guests quitting the ceremony for their cars after the second "I do"; especially hasty couples did away with the festivities altogether and simply took their vows en route to the park. — Pam Jones

I've opened up my school in California in a beautiful facility on Ventura Boulevard. I'm always in heaven when I'm doing my classes. — Tasha Smith

I finally had to go to the American Civil Liberties Union here in northern California to get my reply published to what I considered to be a hatchet job done by Stanley Crouch. — Ishmael Reed

Without respect, there is no love ... for long, for anyone, but a fool. — J. California Cooper

Nobody can tell about this California climate. One minit its hot and the next minit its cold, so a person never knows what to hock. — Anita Loos

My life had been peaceful, safe, quiet and restful. I had done invited trouble in and I had done put trouble out. — J. California Cooper

It was kind of a beautiful day, finally real summer in Indianapolis, warm and humid - the kind of weather that reminds you after a long winter that while the world wasn't built for humans, we were built for the world. Dad was waiting for us, wearing a tan suit, standing in a handicapped parking spot typing away on his handheld. He waved as we parked and then hugged me. "What a day," he said. "If we lived in California, they'd all be like this. — John Green

We stick to the magical places in the world," Asahi clarified.

"Places like the MBRC, the Redwood forest of California, the less populated parts of New Zealand and Japan, Disney World, and Atlantis," Madeline listed, ticking the places off on her fingers.

"Wait, Disney World?" I interrupted.

"The most magical place on Earth. — K.M. Shea

I grew up in southern California in the '80s. Yes, I am a walking cliche. — John Scalzi

I'd been in Sacramento a day and already noticed the pervasiveness of its homeless problem. The city seemed like California without the masks or pretense: a place where dreams were occasionally made but mostly torn apart. — Tom Bissell

So many people don't know who's on the State Seal and they don't know, not just in California but the United States of America, things they look at every day and they say, 'Wow! I didn't know that.' — Maria Shriver

I've lived in California for half of my life. It's weird, everyone thinks of me as this guy who's from the South ... I'm really a Californian. — Billy Bob Thornton

Exhibit 6.2 Cost of $1,000 in Monthly Lifetime Annuity Income, Starting at Age 65 Year Male Female 2004 $157,432 $167,818 2005 $157,255 $167,817 2006 $151,700 $161,363 2007 $151,524 $160,966 2008 $147,953 $155,843 2009 $156,500 $165,502 2010 $170,116 $178,410 2011 $174,828 $182,952 2012 $187,008 $195,216 2013 $183,728 $191,571 Average $163,804 $172,746 Source: CANNEX Financial Exchanges for non-COLA-adjusted qualified annuity income with a 10-year guarantee for California. — Moshe A. Milevsky

Elections officials here in California are concerned that having 247 candidates would require a ballot so long it would be difficult to count. Today in Florida they said, 'What? You count the ballots?' — Jay Leno

When I was signing up for the University of Southern California's music program, I flipped a coin to decide my major. If it came up heads, it would be flute - tails would be voice. — Sondra Radvanovsky

My record at the University of California as an undergraduate was mediocre to say the best. — Douglass North

One of the things that the court held in Brown v. Board of Education is that government can't impose a badge of inferiority on some of its citizens. Yet that is exactly what Proposition 8 does with respect to gay and lesbian couples in California. — David Boies

Before I lived in America, my husband and I did a Californian road trip. We took a month, starting off in L.A. I love the landscapes of California: one moment you're in the desert, the next you're up in the Napa Valley or by the water in Big Bear. — Ashley Jensen

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

I must confess, I'm not the best cook. I make a mean salsa, as I like hot sauce and, you know, tacos, because I'm a California kid, and that's about it. — Sasha Grey

How can people in California have problems with their feet?" asks Molly moving around Olive with a plate of sandwiches. "Don't they drive everywhere? — Elizabeth Strout

There is nothing remarkable about this 'guac', about any 'guac', and California needs to calm the fuck down. — Caroline Kepnes

A.Q., Keyes remembered, stood for Asshole Quotient. Skip Wiley had a well-known theory that the quality of life declined in direct proportion to the Asshole Quotient. According to Wiley's reckoning, Miami had 134 total assholes per square mile, giving it the worst A.Q. in North America. In second place was Aspen, Colorado (101), with Malibu Beach, California, finishing third at 97. — Carl Hiaasen

Ralph Nader choose the man with whom to share the responsibility of running a distant third, California activist Peter Camejo. You may remember that Camejo ran for president in 1976 on the Socialist Workers Party ticket. Actually, you might only remember that if you run a lesbian, vegetarian, bookstore. — Jon Stewart

At the suggestion of Professor Itaru Watanabe, and with his help, I left Japan at the age of twenty-three to pursue graduate study at the University of California at San Diego. — Susumu Tonegawa

California, here I come, right back where I started from. — Al Jolson

Quite honestly, I live in California in the off season. Going off to Green Bay is just like two different walks of life - I hunt, fish, practice with firearms. Back in California, it's spend time at the beach, go to the movies. — Clay Matthews III

McDermott and two colleagues - James H. Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and Nicholas A. Christakis of Harvard University - published a paper titled 'Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too.' Their study shows that divorce can spread like a virus among friends, siblings and co-workers. — Katie Hafner

I can no more explain why I like "natural history" than why I like California canned peaches; nor why I do not care for that enormous brand of natural history which deals with invertebrates any more than why I do not care for brandied peaches. All I can say is that almost as soon as I began to read at all I began to like to read about the natural history of beasts and birds and the more formidable or interesting reptiles and fishes. — Theodore Roosevelt

I have three adopted children with Phil, and for years I was fighting in court with him over being able to see my kids. I was always going back and forth to California, going to court, and I was never able to get a project going. — Ronnie Spector

Mr. Tyler acquired Texas by voluntary compact, and Mr. Polk California and New Mexico by successful war. — Robert Toombs

Well, I'll tell you, one of things I'm proud of is for someone from Southern California, who didn't grow up around coal mines, I learned a lot that tragic day we lost twenty-nine miners at Upper Big Branch coal mine. — Hilda Solis

I did my undergraduate work at the University of California when it was still affordable. But tuition keeps on rising. — Joseph DeRisi

THE SALINAS VALLEY is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay. — John Steinbeck

I am calling on everyone in this state to put the chaos and the division of the recall behind us and do what's right for this great state of California. — Gray Davis

What you do to these men on California's Death Row, you do to God. — Mother Teresa

Future historians, I hope, will consider the American fast food industry a relic of the twentieth century
a set of attitudes, systems, and beliefs that emerged from postwar southern California, that embodied its limitless faith in technology, that quickly spread across the globe, flourished briefly, and then receded, once its true costs became clear and its thinking became obsolete. — Eric Schlosser

It was there that I wanted, out there somewhere, when I sat elbow-to-elbow with my giggling friends and let my thoughts swirl up and away from the three-mile radius of our small town lives. In my head, I careened out of town and across state lines, until the landscape became strange and unfamiliar. I wanted to see all of it. Everything. The vast expanses of the flat Midwest, miles of horizontal earth with the curving horizon at its end. Strange, stunted trees and driftwood skeletons on the lonely windswept beaches of the farthest coasts. Towering oaks hung thick with the gray lace of Spanish moss, looming like hovering parents over shaded southern dirt. The California sun, dipping and disappearing into the ocean, tipping the waves with orange light. — Kat Rosenfield

I do a lot of work with the Red Cross, too. As a reporter, before I went to entertainment news, I tended to follow natural disasters. I went to Charleston, South Carolina, after Hurricane Hugo. I went to Miami the year after they were recovering from Hurricane Andrew. I came to California when they were recovering from a big earthquake. I've seen the Red Cross and how they stay there years after a natural disaster. They're not just there when a disaster is happening. — Nancy O'Dell

One identity is as a television writer, which is very classically Southern California, but another of my personae is as a New Yorker cartoonist. — Bruce Eric Kaplan

And if California slides into the ocean, as the mystics and statistics say it will, I predict this hotel will be standing until I've paid my bill. — Warren Zevon

Obviously California is fantastic in terms of produce, vegetables. — Eric Ripert

One good thing about New York is that most people function daily while in a low-grade depression. It's not like if you're in Los Angeles, where everyone's so actively working on cheerfulness and mental and physical health that if they sense you're down, they shun you. Also, all that sunshine is a cruel joke when you're depressed. In New York, even in your misery, you feel like you belong. — Mindy Kaling

I love seeing America vote, through the prism of my older working class neighborhood in Riverside, California. — Susan Straight

Here in California, one candidate for governor is a 100-year-old woman. She's going door-to-door and asking one simple question - 'Do I live here?' — Craig Kilborn

We need to incorporate that age-old concept of redemption into the work that we do in the criminal justice system in California. — Kamala Harris

Viola had a harrowing story about riding a bicycle west out of the burnt-out ruins of a Connecticut suburb, aged fifteen, harboring vague notions of California but set upon by passersby long before she got there, grievously harmed, joining up with other half feral teenagers in a marauding gang and then slipping away from them, walking alone for a hundred miles, whispering French to herself because all the horror in her life had transpired in English and she thought switching languages might save her, wandering into a town through which the Symphony passed five years later. — Emily St. John Mandel

If you're the type of person who has to fulfill your dreams, you've gotta be resourceful to make sure you can do it. I came out to California when I was 21, thinking my New York credentials would take me all the way. I came back home a year later all dejected and a failure. — Vin Diesel

Trust the horticulturalist: California's genius may be green, but it's underlying beauty is brown. — Jared Farmer

If I'm going to meditate, there is a little church up in Montecito, California. It's an old Spanish mission, actually. I find it comforting in there. — Michael Keaton

Calling something "new age" is one of the media's biggest canons. If you're called "new age," you couldn't possibly be serious, you couldn't possibly have anything deep to say, and you probably hang out in California too much - and we know that no one in California reads books or has any serious thoughts! — Marianne Williamson

The problems in California have been that it's been very difficult to site and build new power plants. — Kenneth Lay

In California today, you may save more water by not eating a pound of beef than you would by not showering for six entire months. — John Robbins

It's important to remember something: California is not a state built on moderation. We invented motion pictures. We made an electric sports car. We're both the brain (Silicon Valley) and the heart (Hollywood, alas) of this great nation, and meanwhile we grow everyone's strawberries. We're open to innovation. We're open to new ideas. We're open to odd couples - and to strays from all parts of the world. Look at our last governor: an Austrian body builder and son of a Nazi married to John F. Kennedy's niece. Anything can happen. — Scott Hutchins

I'm a California girl. I grew up in Inglewood right by LAX. — Becky G

Many of the people I work with I've worked with in other lifetimes. I moved to California because I knew that many of my students from past lives were in California. — Frederick Lenz

Westerns was why I got into the business. I grew up on a small farm in California and all I ever wanted to do was to play gangsters and cowboys in movies. — Brion James

Texas has done a very good job of securing their borders with the help of the federal government. California has done a good job. — Jan Brewer

I was raised in the West. The west of Texas. It's pretty close to California. In more ways than Washington, D.C., is close to California. — George W. Bush

My birthplace was California, but I couldn't forget Armenia, so what is one's country? Is it land of the earth, in a specific place? Rivers there? Lakes? The sky there? The way the moon comes up there? And the sun? Is one's country the trees, the vineyards, the grass, the birds, the rocks, the hills and summer and winter? Is it the animal rhythm of the living there? The huts and houses, the streets of cities, the tables and chairs, and the drinking of tea and talking? Is it the peach ripening in summer heat on the bough? Is it the dead in the earth there? — William, Saroyan

Steve is troubled by a lot of things. He is twenty-three, was raised in Virginia, and has the idea that California is the beginning of the end. "I feel it's insane," he says, and his voice drops. "This chick tells me there's no meaning to life but it doesn't matter, we'll just flow right out. There've been times I felt like packing up and taking off for the East Coast again, at least there I had a target. At least there you expect that it's going to happen." He lights a cigarette for me and his hands shake. "Here you know it's not going to."
I ask what it is that is supposed to happen.
"I don't know," he says. "Something. Anything. — Joan Didion

Can't we go another way?"
"Nope. Only way to reach the green grass of Oregon or the sweet gold of California is through hell itself."
I roll my eyes. The Major has been especially colorful since his amputation, cussing and exaggerating and telling tall tales. He reminds me of Daddy, except not fit for female company. — Rae Carson

Let me share some facts with you about the law in most of our country. California is in many ways a little different from the rest of the world, and California has better gun laws than many states, although California's need to be improved. — Michael D. Barnes

I was foolish because I believed in you. You are a fool because you believe in yourself! — J. California Cooper

My father has positional vertigo, and if he flies he gets really dizzy, so he has to drive out to California, which he does a couple times a year. We talk, but we e-mail mostly. — Ben Affleck

This is Reagan country. Yeah! And perhaps it was destiny that the man who went to California's Eureka College would become so woven within and inter-linked to the Golden State. — Sarah Palin

I'd like to talk to Arnold Schwarzenegger, 'cause I live in California and I just want to see that canned, chemical filled body in my office. — Henry Rollins

Prospects for growth in the year ahead are solid at the national level, and of course, this can only be good news for the Bay Area and California as well. The U. S. economy has shown remarkable resilience in the face of some severe shocks - in particular, the surge in energy prices that began a couple of years ago and the devastation wrought by the twin hurricanes last summer. — Janet Yellen