Old California Quotes & Sayings

OLD GRIZZLY ADAMS. [37-*] James C. Adams, or "Grizzly Adams," as he was generally termed, from the fact of his having captured so many grizzly bears, and encountered such fearful perils by his unexampled daring, was an extraordinary character. For many years a hunter and trapper in the Rocky and Sierra Nevada Mountains, he acquired a recklessness which, added to his natural invincible courage, rendered him truly one of the most striking men of the age. He was emphatically what the English call a man of "pluck." In 1860, he arrived in New York with his famous collection of California animals, captured by himself, consisting of twenty or thirty immense grizzly bears, at the head of which stood "Old Sampson" - now in the American Museum - wolves, half a dozen other species of bear, California lions, tigers, buffalo, elk, etc., and Old Neptune, the great sea-lion, from the Pacific. — P.T. Barnum

When I was 11 years old, I was bullied. It mainly started when I moved to California to pursue my dreams of being an actress. Kids back home in Texas, who I thought were my friends, were saying things behind my back. They said that I would never make it because I wasn't talented or pretty enough to be on TV. — Raini Rodriguez

Being a military child, we moved a lot and we developed different vernaculars from moving from the south, to the Midwest, and seeing the world. Going from New York to California and from Jamaica Queens to the South, I was always the new kid, or had the army crew haircut. I expected people to pick up on me. My brother kinda stole all of my old jokes. He got his inspiration from me. — Joe Torry

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

One of the West's singular migrations
from the Azores to California's Great Central Valley
is given faces and voices in Anthony Barcellos's new novel, Land of Milk and Money. Along with its triumphs, the Francisco family embodies the challenges to an immigrant family in a new land, including the often ignored difficulties posed by success and the loss of the old culture. A must read ... — Gerald Haslam

There are no old people in California. Nobody ever gets a chance to grow old there. The climate won't let you. The scenery won't let you. The life won't let you. — Inez Haynes Irwin

The receding waves of foreign peon labor are leaving California agriculture to the mercies of our own people. The old methods of intimidation and starvation perfected against the foreign peons are being used against the new white migrant workers. But they will not be successful. — John Steinbeck

I was six months old at the time that I was taken, with my mother and father, from Sacramento, California, and placed in internment camps in the United States. — Robert Matsui

My mom started working at the California Shakespeare Theater in Oakland when I was two years old, so I've always grown up around theater. — Zendaya

Really, truly, try to figure out what your palate is all about. If you've determined that you don't like dirty old stinky wine - old-world flavors - you probably like new-world fruit bombs. Stick to Shirazes and California Cabernets or Zinfandels. — Gary Vaynerchuk

I am always worried that over-planning and outlining will kill the magic of writing; most of the world I created in 'California' occurred via good old sexy sentence-making. — Edan Lepucki

California belongs to Joan Didion. Not the California where everyone wears aviator sunglasses, owns a Jacuzzi and buys his clothes on Rodeo Drive. But California in the sense of the West. The old West where Manifest Destiny was an almost palpable notion that was somehow tied to the land and the climate and one's own family-an unspoken belief that was passed down to children in stories and sayings. — Michiko Kakutani

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

Fairchild Parent rewarded Fairchild Child's success the way all East Coast companies of the era did: it kept a sizable chunk of the profits to fund other company operations, and it promoted the people at the top of the division to a fancier position and a better salary for a job well done. Back in New Jersey, it didn't cross anyone's mind that this was exactly the wrong response to an egalitarian company that shared both risk and reward among all of its employees, whose executives had moved to California precisely to get away from the Old World of business, and which needed to plow most of its profits back into product development to stay ahead of the competition in a fast-moving take-no-prisoners industry. — Michael S. Malone

In California, I guess you belong to the state; you don't even belong to your parents. It's an old Spanish law. It doesn't require your parents to swear out a complaint; anybody can. — Bo Derek

There's a case in Baton Rouge, haunting me, where a mother left her twelve-year-old daughter to be babysat (every day for months) by a known pedophile and his four perverse friends, and the news broke of the bodies of two children, dead after long-term physical abuse, found in a storage locker in California. What hardest for me is, I suppose, what's hardest for my country — Laura Mullen

The California I knew, old rancho California, is gone. It just doesn't exist, except maybe in little pockets. I lived on the edge of the Mojave Desert, an area that used to be farm country. There were all these fresh-produce stands with avocados and date palms. You could get a dozen artichokes for a buck or something. Totally wiped out now. — Sam Shepard

The house in Silverlake was dark, its windows as empty as a dead man's eyes. It was an old California Craftsman with a full front porch and two dormer windows set on the long slope of the roof. But no light shone behind the glass, not even from above the doorway. Instead, the house cast a foreboding darkness about it that not even the glow from the streetlight could penetrate. A man could be standing there on the porch and Bosch knew he probably wouldn't be able to see him. 'You — Michael Connelly

It's a shame about California, and particularly about L.A., where they've demolished so many landmarks. It's a bit of a disease there, where if anything is over 30 years old, they sort of knock it down and replace it. It's a strange town, it's this sprawling suburb, and then there's a city, the old town. — Gary Oldman

My biggest extravagances are also investments. I have several houses in California, a house in Nashville, an office complex, and I bought the old home place in Tennessee. They are different places for me to write, but I can turn right around and sell them. — Dolly Parton

We ain't in California no more," Pilate said. "Every fuckin' body up here's got a gun. Even that old lady in the hamburger shop, shot Michelle. — John Sandford

Next time! In what calendar are kept the records of those next times which never come? — Helen Hunt Jackson

I have to entertain myself. An easy way to explain it is I worked in NY since I was five-years-old doing modeling and commercials, and that's a completely different world than in California where I think there's different dreams and aspirations of maybe being a so-called 'star' and so forth. Here you do your work, whether it's theater or commercials. — Linda Blair

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

When I came home for the summer after my first year of college, I told my mother that my best friend and I were driving to California. She laughed out loud - 2,000 miles in a what? Well, my best friend had an old Chevy. What could go wrong? — Jane Smiley

You know, I have to tell you"
I tried to make my voice bright to lighten the moo
"this ring of yours has got to be the ugliest thing I have ever seen."
"I'm insulted." He held his hand up to the moonlight and straightened the monstrosity on his finger. "My dad gave this to me when we moved to Michigan.'To remember the old life' he said. I've never taken it off. I look at it and see California."
"Remind me never to visit California. — Linda Gerber

People say California is the leading state on these type of issues. I've called my sister today and I said - I have a 3-year-old nephew - "Do you spank?"And she says, "If it's necessary I will. But that's my decision. I'm the mother. Not you." — Sean Hannity

I think Yandex is something in between two different cultures. One originated from the old Soviet culture of the scientific institute. It was a free atmosphere of scientists, maybe too free because nobody cared about making money. Another origin is something close to what you usually see in California startups. — Arkady Volozh

Who'd give up sunny California for the grey old Earls Court Road? I'm looking out at blue skies and the mountains and trees, and it's so beautiful. — Patrick Macnee

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

I've got an extra-specific story about Dr. Dre. I saw him when I was 9 years old in Compton - him and Tupac. They were shooting the second 'California Love' video. My pops had seen him and ran back to the house and got me, put me on his neck, and we stood there watching Dre and Pac in a Bentley. — Kendrick Lamar

Honestly, are we ever going to get over 'California Girls' by Katy Perry? I know it's old, but that song - I love that song! — Becky G

I'm a mother of a three-year-old, but when I started 'California,' my son wasn't even a twinkle in my eye. Because the book took as long as it did, I wrote it before I was pregnant, while I was pregnant, and as a new mother - so I enjoyed a diversity of experiences while creating this world. — Edan Lepucki

All four had easy access to guns. Most of the weapons they used were in the home. Cox bought his at Wolfe's Gun Shop in his hometown of San Gabriel, for $400 - easy-peasy. The clerk had no reason not to sell it to him; the boy said the semi-auto was a present for his father and was old enough under California law to buy a firearm. — Stephen King

I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up. — Flannery O'Connor

I speak directly to the people, and I know that the people of California want to have better leadership. They want to have great leadership. They want to have somebody that will represent them. And it doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or a Republican, young or old. — Arnold Schwarzenegger

Understand that friends come and go, but for the precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle because the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young. Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard; live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel. Accept certain inalienable truths, prices will rise, politicians will philander, you too will get old, and when you do you'll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders. Respect your elders. Don't expect anyone else to support you. — Baz Luhrmann

People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band. — Charles Portis

I had just arrived in New York from California. I was nineteen years old and excited beyond belief. I was an art student and an acting student and behaved as most young actors did - meaning that there was no such thing as a good actor, 'cause you yourself hadn't shown up yet. — Robert Redford

A small-time hoodlum who had spent most of the 1960s at San Quentin State Prison in California, the 30-year-old Bryant claimed that he hijacked Flight 97 under orders from his higher-ups in the Black Panther Party; he said his mission was to arrange for the purchase of bazookas to aid the organization's struggle against oppression. — Brendan I. Koerner

Most ballerinas take their first ballet class when they are 5 or 6 years old. I was 13 when I took mine on the basketball court of the San Pedro Boys & Girls Club in California. — Misty Copeland

My father was a small-town banker. He became very ill when I was 10 years old, and we went to California three years later in an attempt to recover his health, which never happened. — Warren Christopher

We have flattered ourselves by inventing proverbs of comparison in matter of blindness,
"blind as a bat," for instance. It would be safe to say that there cannot be found in the animal kingdom a bat, or any other creature, so blind in its own range of circumstance and connection, as the greater majority of human beings are in the bosoms of their families. Tempers strain and recover, hearts break and heal, strength falters, fails, and comes near to giving way altogether, every day, without being noted by the closest lookers-on. — Helen Hunt Jackson

We all grew up, those of us who took On the Road to heart. We came to cringe a little at our old favorite poet, concluding that God was likely never Pooh Bear, that sometimes New York and California could be just as isolated as our provincial hometown, and that grown men didn't run back and forth all the time bleeding soup and sympathy out of sucker women. But those are just details, really. We got what we needed, namely a passion for unlikely words, the willingness to improvise, a distrust of authority, and a sentimental attachment to a certain America ... — Sarah Vowell

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

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

I do California casual a little bit better than really small European cut, tight apparel But I can rock some Gucci when I need to. I say this as I'm wearing Adidas sweatpants and a ten-year-old Chrome Hearts T-shirt. — Carson Daly

I lit a candle in a Catholic church for the first time that afternoon. Me, a Presbyterian. I lit a candle in the warm, dark, waxy-smelling air of Saint Adelbert's. I put it beside the one that Mrs. Baker lit. I don't know what she prayed for, but I prayed that no atomic bomb would ever drop on Camillo Junior High or the Quaker meetinghouse or the old jail or Temple Emmanuel or Hicks Park or Saint Paul's Episcopal School or Saint Adelbert's. I prayed for Lieutenant Baker, missing in action somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam near Khesanh. I prayed for Danny Hupfer, sweating it out in Hebrew school right then. I prayed for my sister, driving in a yellow bug toward California - or maybe she was there already, trying to find herself. And I hoped that it was okay to pray for a bunch of things with one candle. — Gary D. Schmidt

THE SPRING IS BEAUTIFUL in California. Valleys in which the fruit blossoms are fragrant pink and white waters in a shallow sea. Then the first tendrils of the grapes, swelling from the old gnarled vines, cascade down to cover the trunks. The full green hills are round and soft as breasts. And on the level vegetable lands are the mile-long rows of pale green lettuce and the spindly little cauliflowers, the gray-green unearthly artichoke plants. — John Steinbeck

California nurse Jared Axen was holding a dying hospice patient's hand when he began to sing an old hymn. The woman, who didn't speak English, hadn't been responsive in days. But when Axen sang to her, she squeezed his hand, a response that soothed the woman's family. Six years later, Axen, a classically trained musician, sings to some of his patients every day. "It gives them their humanity back," he said. "Music is a common language that helps me connect with my patients." Many patients also claim to feel better and to need fewer pain medications, Axen said. "It's become a vital tool for my patients and their families. — Alexandra Robbins

It's not that I have any moral compunctions about work ... but grampa may die to-morrow and he may live for ten years. Meanwhile we're living above our income and all we've got to show for it is a farmer's car and a few clothes. We keep an apartment that we've only lived in three months and a little old house way off in nowhere. We're frequently bored and yet we won't make any effort to know any one except the same crowd who drift around California all summer wearing sport clothes and waiting for their families to die. — F Scott Fitzgerald

everyone who comes to California brings a little of his own state with him. His own old state, regardless of where or when, is always lurking in the back of his memory for comparison with what he finds here. — Max Miller

I'm very stodgy. I'm always looking at old photos of California and Los Angeles, knowing that what I'm looking at is now full of houses. There used to be vacant lots in Los Angeles, now all taken up by three-storey boxes - it's all getting infilled. — Edward Ruscha

Did you hear about this 20-year-old kid named John Walker from Northern California who was apparently fighting for the Taliban? ... It didn't take long for the TV networks to jump on this Walker thing. CBS has a new show: 'Walker: Taliban Ranger.' — Jay Leno

I think in the old days, the nexus of weirdness ran through Southern California, and to a degree New York City. I think it's changed so that every bizarre story in the country now has a Florida connection. I don't know why, except it must be some inversion of magnetic poles or something. — Carl Hiaasen

California's 74-year-old Senator Barbara Boxer announced she will not run for re-election in 2016. When I saw the headline '74-Year-Old Boxer,' I assumed they were making another 'Rocky' movie. — Conan O'Brien

My parents divorced when I was 3 years old. They had a lounge act in Las Vegas, where I was born. The band broke up and the marriage dissolved, and my mother, my sister and I moved to Southern California. And I didn't see my dad a lot growing up; he was on the road a lot. I'd see him every couple years. — Jenny Lewis

I was fortunate to start the sport at a young age. I was 6 years old when my dad started teaching me. We started playing tournaments together when I was 11, in the lower ranking of beach volleyball in California. We weren't playing against kids; we played against grown men, so immediately, I had to raise my game to compete. — Karch Kiraly

I guess us folks in California are kind of straitlaced and old-fashioned.
Hahaha, I thought on the way downstairs. I never thought I'd say those words with a straight face ... — J.R. Rain

I believe in that old adage that 'as goes California, so goes the country.' — Kamala Harris

California, that advance post of our civilization, with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life ... its flavourless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried rooted in tradition and character. — J.B. Priestley

Wherever I am, I will embrace the life and the lifestyle. I've lived in Hollywood before, and we've moved into the old neighbourhood in West Hollywood. I love California. — John Barrowman

The yard was full of tomato plants about to ripen, and mint, mint, everything smelling of mint, and one fine old tree that I loved to sit under on those cool perfect starry California October nights unmatched anywhere in the world. — Jack Kerouac

My parents separated before I was 1 year old. I moved in with my aunt and uncle when I was in fourth grade. I was, like, 8 or 9 years old. I was getting in a lot of trouble when I was in Southern California. My older sisters were in gangs. My older brother was in gangs. — Troy Polamalu

That wasn't Josh Hartnett; that kid was eighteen years old," Kate said.
I told you, they age slower out here. It's all the fresh California air," Val replied.
Yes, because that's exactly what Los Angeles is known for," Kate said dryly. "Clean air. — Julie James

Off to California in that tired old VW with the disintegrating fuel pump like a family of dustbowl Okies? — Stephen King

You raise them half-decent, and they grow up and leave. They move to Miami or California
someplace with gourmet groceries and nude beaches because you've reared them to cook good and be liberal minded. It's just the opposite with your failures
them kids stick to your tail like a cocklebur. You'd think it would be the other way around, but it's not. No matter how old I get, this will always amaze me. — Michael Lee West

In California, we are a sixty percent Hispanic state, we elected an Austrian governor. Even old Nazis are going That's weird. — Robin Williams

Nikhilananda's birthday. Maybe we'd Morris dance, naked, around the base of an old-growth California redwood, its branches lavishly festooned with the soiled hammocks and poop buckets of crunchy-granola tree sitters mentoring spotted owls in passive-resistance protest techniques. You get the picture. In place of Santa Claus, my mom and dad said Maya Angelou kept tabs on whether little children were naughty or nice. Dr. Angelou, they warned me, did her accounting on a long hemp scroll of names, and if I failed to turn my compost I'd be sent to bed with no algae. Me, I just wanted to know that someone wise and carbon neutral - Dr. Maya or Shirley Chisholm or Sean Penn - was paying attention. But none of that was really Christmas. And none of that Earth First! baloney helps out once you're dead and you discover that the snake-handling, — Chuck Palahniuk

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

When I first saw California, it was extraordinary. Because I came from old, black, dark England, still recovering from World War II. I grew up with bomb sites everywhere. — Geoffrey West

All of a sudden, I feel very old and very tired. Maybe when I get to California, the smog, brush fires, floods, and earthquakes will cheer me up. — Erma Bombeck

There had been no crises of incident, or marked movements of experience such as in Felipe's imaginations of love were essential to the fulness of its growth. This is a common mistake on the part of those who have never felt love's true bonds. Once in those chains, one perceives that they are not of the sort full forged in a day. They are made as the great iron cables are made, on which bridges are swung across the widest water-channels,
not of single huge rods, or bars, which would be stronger, perhaps, to look at; but myriads of the finest wires, each one by itself so fine, so frail, it would barely hold a child's kite in the wind: by hundreds, hundreds of thousands of such, twisted, re-twisted together, are made the mighty cables, which do not any more swerve from their place in the air, under the weight and jar of the ceaseless traffic and tread of two cities, than the solid earth swerves under the same ceaseless weight and jar. Such cables do not break. — Helen Hunt Jackson