Palo Quotes & Sayings

When Facebook famously moved out to Palo Alto, there were people in the same house Facebook was based in working on different ideas. It is vital to remember that. — Patrick Collison

You're really dumb," she whispered in my ear.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Why do you think there're eighteen pebbles in my wagon?" And then the last remaining space between our lips was gone and I was falling headlong into her eyes, right there on Palo Verde after dinner. And I can tell you, that was no saint kissing me. — Jerry Spinelli

John Seely Brown, the former director of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, once said, The essence of being human involves asking questions, not answering them. — Eric Schmidt

Wanting our kids to be successful is natural," says Palo Alto psychiatrist Stacy Budin. "But the less healthy part comes from the hyper drive in our communities for kids to set themselves apart and shine in one way or another, or in all ways. There's so much pressure for kids to achieve that it can become the focus of the mother's life to ensure that high achievement happens. Some mothers seem to have nothing but their kids' SATs and accomplishments to talk about. Then, when college admission offers come, the competitiveness, bragging, and comparisons are hard for all but the few who have the most to brag about. It's not great for kids and it's not great for mothers."32 And what's more, this great achievement race is all calibrated to a college admission system that is very, very broken. — Julie Lythcott-Haims

Modern elites live in bubbles of liberal affluence like Ann Arbor, Brookline, the Upper West Side, Palo Alto, or Chevy Chase. These places used to have impoverished neighborhoods nearby, but the poor people got chased out by young singles living in group homes, hipsters, and urban homesteading gay couples. — P. J. O'Rourke

Wit.ai, based in Palo Alto, California, is taking aim at the swiftly growing number of devices with small displays, or no screen at all, and at activities like driving and cooking, where you don't want to look at or touch a display. The company is offering its product free to those who agree to share their user data with the Wit.ai community. Collecting this data should help improve the accuracy of the system over time. "Everyone will benefit from that," cofounder and CEO Alex Lebrun says. — Anonymous

You have to ask what the end game is here - when 25 percent of Palo Alto homes are sold to overseas buyers as investments while the mainland Chinese property market tanks, when Palo Alto schools are known for their suicide rates as much as their academics, when the city that gave birth to the technology industry now can't even house startups because of its sky-high commercial rents, when Latino and black communities are being wiped from the Western side of the San Francisco Bay Area and Oakland out into the exurbs of the East only to be called back by smartphone to deliver laundry or drive people around. — Anonymous

Palo's three older brothers had died in the Paraguayan War, conscripted by the Argentinian government, taken off by force along with all the black men of their generation, because, Palo told young Santiago, they needed a way to not only win their war but also rid this country of us in the process, two birds with one stone. Buenos Aires was too black for them, one third of the population, that's enough blackness to swallow you up! to get strong on you! and so they sent our fathers off to war and opened floodgates to European steamships so that white men would pour into the city to replace us, and their plan worked, the bastarda, look at our city now. — Carolina De Robertis

The hardest thing on 'Palo Alto' was letting go because I kept working on it, trying to make it better. — Gia Coppola

He kissed the top of her head. "How did you meet him?"
She curled up against Chase. "I was running a cougar in the Palo Duro Canyon and he saw me and chased after me."
"Sounds like you have a penchant for that.... — Terry Spear

I spent two years in Palo Alto - what an awful, suffocating place for those of us who don't care about yoga, yogurts and start-ups - and now I have moved to Cambridge, MA - which, in many respects, is like Palo Alto but a bit snarkier. — Evgeny Morozov

We, Will Ferrell and I, were approached by Sequoia, which is a big financing firm up in Palo Alto; they do a lot of Internet stuff, and they came to us and said they had an idea for a comedy site, and Will and I were sorta like, 'Yeah, we don't know. It's the Internet, we've seen it come and go.' — Adam McKay

Garcia had traded his Sears electric guitar for an acoustic model shortly after arriving in Palo Alto, and late that spring Barbara bought him a better guitar, and shortly after that, a lovely sounding Stella twelve-string. — Blair Jackson

When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Apple computer in a garage in Palo Alto, it heralded the beginning of the PC revolution that ultimately dealt a death-blow to dozens of older companies. — Eric Ries

When I was asked to compose a score for ... 'Palo Alto,' I first thought to myself, 'What is the house that these characters would want to live in?' I wanted to paint a picture and color scheme that I could work around. I gently apply different daubs to see what fits to match the color I have in mind with these characters. — Dev Hynes

In lieu of descending to follow the Via Aurelia where it wound down a few miles off the coast, by Santa Maranella and Santa Severa and mediaeval Palo, and the volcanic soil and the steep ravines by Cervetri, where the long avenues of cliff-sepulchres are all that remain to show the site of Caere, and gaining so the mouth of Tiber to ascend the stream in any boat that he might find by Fiumicino, he still struck across the country by cattle-tracks known alone to himself and wild men like him, and chose to leave the Maccarese morasses untrodden in his rear, and had followed the course of the Arrone River as far as the high cliffs up by forsaken Galera. — Ouida

When I lived in Beijing in 1996, it was a horizontal city. If you wanted to go out for a burger, if you wanted to really treat yourself, you went to this place called the Jianguo Hotel. The architect had proudly described it as a perfect replica of a Holiday Inn that he had seen in Palo Alto, California. — Evan Osnos

It wasn't until we got our first office in Palo Alto where things became more like a company. We never went into this wanting to build a company. — Mark Zuckerberg

When I was nine, we moved to Stanford University in San Francisco so that my father could do a Ph.D. I went to Terman Junior High in Palo Alto. It was terrible, because my hormones were all over the place, and I became an ugly adolescent full of rage and loathing. — Caroline Lawrence

Years later, on a Steve Jobs discussion board on the website Gawker, the following tale appeared from someone who had worked at the Whole Foods store in Palo Alto a few blocks from Jobs' home: 'I was shagging carts one afternoon when I saw this silver Mercedes parked in a handicapped spot. Steve Jobs was inside screaming at his car phone. This was right before the first iMac was unveiled and I'm pretty sure I could make out, 'Not. Fucking. Blue. Enough!!! — Walter Isaacson

If you're a teenager in Palo Alto launching an app, you know from the outset how you plan to finance your business. — Natalie Massenet

Our plutocracy, whether the hedge fund managers in Greenwich, Connecticut, or the Internet moguls in Palo Alto, now lives like the British did in colonial India: ruling the place but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; to the person fortunate enough to own a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension, and viable public transportation doesn't even compute. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare? — Mike Lofgren

Four years later, in 2013, Facebook bought Instagram for one billion dollars in cash and stock. A billion dollars! Driving to Palo Alto in Evan's Porsche, I couldn't even conceive of a number that high. I like to think that Mark Zuckerberg learned something from his encounter with us. He wasn't going to hedge his bets this time with some paltry offer like five hundred million in a mix of stock and cash. He probably said to Kevin Systrom, the creator of Instagram, "You've been working on this for eighteen months. I will give you one billion dollars." I mean, startup, schmart-up. Who could say no to that? — Biz Stone

My advice is never let a publicist call you a 'visionary.' I've hung out with the visionaries at the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. I've been a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur. I wouldn't touch 'visionary' with a 10-foot pole. — Robert Metcalfe

It was only in Palo Alto that I searched "Rachav Binder" and "Rach Binder," got an undousable flame of her defense of an article of mine critical of the Mormon Church's databasing of Holocaust victims in order to speed their posthumous conversions — Joshua Cohen

Facebook's headquarters is a two-story building at the end of a quiet, tree-lined street. Zuckerberg nicknamed it the Bunker. Facebook has grown so fast that this is the company's fifth home in six years - the third in Palo Alto. There is virtually no indication outside of the Bunker's tenant. — Jose Antonio Vargas

In Oakland, he saw two slum children sword fighting on a slag heap. In Palo Alto, a puffy fop in bursting jodhpurs shouted from the door of a luxurious stable, "My horse is soiled!" While one chilly evening in Union Square he listened to a wild-eyed young woman declaim that she had seen delicate grandmothers raped by Kiwanis zombies, that she had seen Rotarian blackguards bludgeoning Easter bunnies in a coal cellar, that she had seen Irving Berlin buying an Orange Julius in Queens. — Thomas McGuane

Ward, do you think we'll have time to ride this afternoon? I'd love to go over some of the old trails with you," Erica asked, smiling at him over the assortment of pastries and wedding cake in the lodge's dining room.
Ward fought the urge to growl his reply that he had an even better idea. He'd love to stuff her into Ralph Cummins's taxi, slam the door, and instruct Ralph to hit the gas and not slow down until he reached Palo Alto, where Erica was currently living. Once the taxi was out of sight, he'd go down to the bottom of the road to Silver Creek Ranch and lock the gates. With a padlock.
Instead, he shoveled in a forkful of the wedding cake Roo had baked and pretended not to hear. He'd been doing a lot of that. — Laura Moore

With 'Palo Alto' as the catalyst, I've surrounded myself with people that have kind of created a world where I can feel like I'm not gonna be judged for doing something that I want to do. — Jack Kilmer

But as far as true goodness was concerned, that didn't exist - not in the land of cowardly men. — Paulo Coelho

Most Web activities do not generate jobs and revenue at the rate of past technological breakthroughs. When Ford and General Motors were growing in the early part of the twentieth century, they created millions of jobs and helped build Detroit into a top-tier U.S. city. Today, Facebook creates a lot of voyeuristic pleasure, but the company doesn't employ many people and hasn't done much for Palo Alto; a lot of the "work" is performed more or less automatically by the software and the servers. You could say that the real work is done by its users, in their spare time and as a form of leisure. Web 2.0 is not filling government coffers or supporting many families, even though it's been great for users, programmers, and some information technology specialists. Everyone on the Web has heard of Twitter, but as of Fall 2010, only about three hundred people work there. — Tyler Cowen

I was born in Palo Alto, California in 1961. — Eric Allin Cornell

I visited Jobs for the last time in his Palo Alto, Calif., home. He had moved to a downstairs bedroom because he was too weak to go up and down stairs. He was curled up in some pain, but his mind was still sharp and his humor vibrant. — Walter Isaacson

I like San Francisco, but I don't think I'd want to work in Palo Alto. It seems like a pretty rough commute. In many ways, I think New York has a lot of things the West Coast doesn't have. — Jon Oringer

Costumes say a lot about a character. When it came to 'Palo Alto,' it was important for me that the kids didn't look perfect. In most teen movies today, all of the clothes are expensive. I remember wearing a lot of dirty vintage clothes. — Gia Coppola

I often have said to people that there are really two cities in the country where the outlook is always forward-looking - there is never really a backward-looking tendency. My banking work has taken me out to Palo Alto, what is commonly called Silicon Valley. And you sense out there is always a forward-looking outlook. And New York City. — Harold Ford Jr.

You guys are more talented than anyone in the Tumblr office or in Palo Alto or Sunnyvale. We're constantly in awe, constantly in service. — David Karp

We live in Palo Alto, which has, fortunately, one of the greatest school districts in the country. — Priscilla Chan