Early California Quotes & Sayings

L.A. prides itself on newness or being the last frontier or just not liking old things and tearing them down to build new things. But Malibu history is interesting to me. My mom's family was one of the early families in California, so there's history going back to the 1840s or '50s. — Kim Gordon

The Urban Literate Southern California Sub-Group of the Early Atomic Period has not yet produced a distinct body of folk music of its own. — Sam Hinton

Home can be the Pennsylvania Turnpike
Indiana's early morning dew
High up in the hills of California
Home is just another word for you — Billy Joel

Sometime in the early Seventies, gender-free toys were briefly a popular idea. So at Christmas on the California beach in 1972, we downplayed the dolls with frilly dresses and loaded up Santa's sack with toy trucks and earth movers for our three daughters. — Tom Brokaw

A man passes for that he is worth. What he is engraves itself on his face, on his form, on his fortunes, in letters of light. Concealment avails him nothing; boasting nothing. There is confession in the glances of our eyes; in our smiles; in salutations; and the grasp of hands. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Patience is the art of finding something else to do. — Groucho Marx

In California in the early Spring, There are pale yellow mornings, when the mist burns slowly into day, The air stings like Autumn, clarifies like pain - Well, I have dreamed this coast myself. — Robert Hass

Now, he told me, I could see what humanity was worth. It could form the conception of justice, but could not trust its flesh to provide judges. Whatever it started was likely to end in old men raving. There was ruin everywhere and we should see more of it. — Rebecca West

Spies and parents never sleep. — Linda Gerber

Addie Moore had a grandson named Jamie who was just turning six. In the early summer the trouble between his parents got worse. There were bad arguments in the kitchen and bedroom, accusations and recriminations, her tears and his shouts. They finally separated on a trial basis and she went off to California to stay with a friend, leaving Jamie with his father. He called Addie and told her what happened, that his wife had quit her job as a hairdresser and had gone out to the West Coast. — Kent Haruf

We have a historic system in place since the early part of the last century and this is going to be one of the biggest battles in California if we decide to take it on. — Marc Levine

Miles jogged off, leaving her alone in the large and quiet room. Aimee stood still, waiting for her mind and heart to go back to normal, return to how she felt a week ago before seeing Miles again.
But they didn't. Or wouldn't. She put both hands over her pounding heart, exhaled, and sank into a chair. Nut-burgers. Now what? — Ophelia London

My first encounter with yoga was in 1969 with my older brother Doug. I was thirteen years old, and he was eighteen. He'd learned about yoga in California on a surfing trip, and when he came back to Houston, Texas, he introduced me to this new stuff he'd learned. I'll always be grateful for that positive influence at an early age. — David F. Swensen

In 1966, I attended Marquette University and graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1970. I received my doctorate in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where I wrote my dissertation on William Faulkner's early novels. — Laurence Yep

I had a weird high school because I graduated early when I was 16. I moved out to California, but I was only there for freshman and sophomore year, and I was a bit of a brainiac. — Shanley Caswell

The early symptoms of the disease [California Curse], which break out almost on arrival in Hollywood, are a sense of exaggerated self-importance and self-centeredness which naturally alienates all old friends. Next comes a great desire for and belief in the importance of money above all else, a loss of the normal sense of humor and proportion and finally, in extreme cases, the abandonment of all previous standards of moral value. — Elinor Glyn

We opened the first Men's Wearhouse in Houston in August 1973, then a store a year for 10 years in Texas. In the early 1980s I opened a store in the San Francisco Bay Area. Within the year, the Texas economy was in total disarray. We were facing Chapter 11, and if not for the California store, we might not have survived. — George Zimmer

It is but another instance of injustice, Fray Felipe said. For twenty years we, of the missions, have been subjected to it, and it grows. The sainted Junipero Serra invaded this land when other men feared, and at San Diego de Alcala he built the first mission of what became a chain, thus giving an empire to the world. Our mistake was that we prospered. We did the work, and others reap the advantages. They began taking out mission-lands from us, lands we had cultivated, which had formed a wilderness and which my brothers had turned into gardens and orchards. They robbed us of worldly goods. And not content with that they now are persecuting us. The mission-empire is doomed, caballero. The time is not far distant when mission roofs will fall in and walls crumble away. Some day people will look at the ruins and wonder how such a thing could come to pass. — Johnston McCulley

My father was second-generation Chinese-American, born in 1923 in California. My mother emigrated to the States from China when she was in her early twenties, in part to escape the political turmoil in China. — Tess Gerritsen

Probably the first time I was a boss was when I was associate dean of the graduate school at the University of Southern California. I was in my early 30s. — Ruth J. Simmons

As young parents of three girls, living in California during the late Sixties and early Seventies, Meredith and I couldn't help but be aware of the rising level of dialogue, debate, commentary, and proclamations about the place of women in society and about how to raise females in light of this raised consciousness. — Tom Brokaw

Katz traces the courageous role of Black women in settling the West (and] deftly shows how these pioneering spirits helped stabilize early communities in Texas, Oklahoma, California and elsewhere. — Herb Boyd

As a young surgeon in training at the University of California San Francisco General Hospital in the early '80s, my colleagues and I were inundated with an epidemic of young men with fevers, rashes, swollen lymph nodes and eventually death. — Richard Carmona

Truth be told, nobody thought Dell's direct business model would work, at least back in the early 90s. As Bill Sharpe, head of the advertising agency that held the Dell Canada account from 1996 to 2006, told me, "I had a business partner in California who said, we have a client, Dell. It sells computers over the phone, and ships them to you. I said, 'There's no way, who's gonna buy a computer over the phone? They're complicated. — Heather Simmons

Sometimes God closes some doors; so, that you can create a door for you to open and pass through it. The only things you must have is confidence that you can create that door where you can defeat, and faith that God allow you to create the door; or, He will open a door that you will need. But, you must create the door first before God decides to open a door for you. — Temitope Owosela

When I came back to California in the early '60s I was hanging out with Jimmy Bowen, Phil Spector, and I wanted to be a record producer and work with other artists. — Johnny Rivers