San Francisco in the years before the 1906 fire provided a sort of Big Rock Candy Mountain for the entire American people . . . Good Americans when they died might, in the terms of the epigram, go to Paris. While they where alive they wanted to go to California. Oceans of champagne, silk hats and frock coats, blooded horses, and houses on Nob Hill, these were the rewards that came to the industrious, the far sighted, or the merely fortunate. What better scheme of things, at least on this side of the river, could any man ask?  

Lucius Beebe

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself. 

Maya Angelou

When you drive in on a Sunday evening after a hot day in the country and catch that first glimpse of the white fog racing in shreds---as though torn from a giant Kleenex box! --- yes, flinging itself, Kleenix-like, through the cables of the world’s greatest if too narrow bridge, you know why you live here.

 Herb Caen

 

My home...It is my retreat and resting place from wars, I try to keep this corner as a haven against the tempest outside, as I do another corner in my soul. 

Michel de Montaigne

Homeless people bear God's image too.

Philip Yancey

It’s a town that is forever grabbing you by the throat and saying, look around, see what’s going on, feel it, experience it. You don’t have to enjoy it. Just don’t turn your back on it, OK?  

Herb Caen

Most people, if you live in a big city, you see some form of schizophrenia every day, and it's always in the form of someone homeless. 'Look at that guy - he's crazy. He looks dangerous.' Well, he's on the streets because of mental illness. He probably had a job and a home. 

Eric McCormack

 

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.  

John Howard Payne

People will sooner aid a sick dog lying on the sidewalk than to try to find shelter for a sick person.

It’s too much to deal with. 

Michael Zaslow

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.

 Friz Hugh Ludlow

 

Where thou art, that is home. 

Emily Dickinson

 

 

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty. 

Mother Teresa

San Francisco is the genius of American cities.  It is the wild-eyed,  all-fired,  hard-boiled,  tender-hearted,  white-haired boy of the American family of cities.  It is the prodigal son.  The city which does everything and is always forgiven,  because of its great heart,  its gentle smile,  its roaring laughter,  its mysterious and magnificent personality.   There are no end of ways of enduring time in San Francisco,  pleasantly,  beautifully,  and with the romance of living in everything.  Eat any kind of dish the races of the world know how to prepare.  Drink any kind of wine you like.  Go to the opera.  The symphony or a stage play.  Loaf around in the high-toned bars,  or in the honky-tonks.  Sail the bay.  If you are alive you can’t be bored in San Francisco.  If you’re not alive,  San Francisco will bring you to life.  San Francisco is a world to explore.  It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure.  It is a city in which the spirit can know refreshment every day.

(circa 1891)

There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort. 

Jane Austen

 

 

Home, the spot of earth supremely blest,
A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest. 

Robert Montgomery

Seven out of ten Americans are one paycheck away from being homeless. 

Pras Michel

Home is where the heart is. 

Pliny the Elder

Whoever laid the town out took the conventional checkerboard pattern of streets and without the slightest regard for the laws of gravity planked it down blind on. . . a confusion of steep slopes and sandhills. The result is exhilarating.

John Dos Passos 

. . .this marvelous city.  

Bazaar of all the nations of the globe,  (compares) with the fantastic creations of ‘The Thousand and One Nights'.

Edmond Auger  

French gold hunter seeing San Francisco in 1849

 

The home should be the treasure chest of living. 

Le Corbusier

 

 

These things become the norm: that some homeless people die of cold on the streets is not news. In contrast, a ten-point drop in the stock markets of some cities is a tragedy. 

Pope Francis

San Francisco

That City of Gold to which adventurers congregated out of all the winds of heaven. I wonder what enchantment of the 'Arabian Nights' can have equaled this evocation of a roaring city, in a few years of a man's life, from the marshes and the blowing sand.

Robert Louis Stevenson

 

We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us.

Winston Churchill

It’s the indescribable conglomeration of beauty and ugliness that makes San Francisco a poem without meter,  a symphony without harmony,  a painting without reason---a city without an equal.  

Herb Caen

The truth is you don't know what is going to happen tomorrow. Life is a crazy ride, and nothing is guaranteed. Eminem

 

 

Being homeless is like living in a post-apocalyptic world. You're on the outskirts of society. 

Frank Dillane

The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely.

Louisa May Alcott

 

 

There is no stupidity great enough to ruin the majesty of the Golden Gate Bridge. It has been the subject of terrible poetry and worse paintings, but it rises easily and grandly above the mundane, its towers poking through the fogs, natural and man-made.  

Herb Caen

Have you ever noticed that the only metaphor we have in our public discourse for solving problems is to declare war on it? We have the war on crime, the war on cancer, the war on drugs. But did you ever notice that we have no war on homelessness? You know why? Because there's no money in that problem. No money to be made off of the homeless. If you can find a solution to homelessness where the corporations and politicians can make a few million dollars each, you will see the streets of America begin to clear up pretty damn quick! 

George Carlin

 

 

The air has an indefinable softness and sweetness—a tonic quality that braces the nerves to a joyous tension, making the very sense of existence a delight.     

Scribner's Monthly

 

 

There is nothing more important than a good, safe, secure home. 

Rosalynn Carter

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Thank God we’re all living in San Francisco. I’d hate to be this annoyed anywhere else.  

Herb Caen

 

 

Home is a shelter from storms - all sorts of storms. 

William Bennett

Most people, if you live in a big city, you see some form of schizophrenia every day, and it's always in the form of someone homeless. 'Look at that guy - he's crazy. He looks dangerous.' Well, he's on the streets because of mental illness. He probably had a job and a home. 

Eric McCormack

I went to San Francisco I saw the bridges high,  Spun across the water Like cobwebs in the sky.

Langston Hughes

We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes...

Madeleine L'Engle

For all its contradictions . . .

San Francisco remains a beacon,  always with that dangerous streak of insanity, built in at birth.  

 Herb Caen

 

 

He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home. 

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

There is no place more delightful than home. 

Marcus Tillius Cicero

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned. 

Maya Angelou

San Francisco beats the world for novelties; but the inventive faculties of her people are exercised as a specialty. . . Controversy is our forte.

San Francisco Call 1864

After all, a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him. 

– Jack Kerouac

 

First in rapture
And first in beauty
Wayward, passionate, brave
Glad of life God gave.
The sea-winds are her kiss,
And the seagull is her dove.
Cleanly and strongly she is --
My cool, grey city of love.
                           

George Sterling

One day if I do go to heaven, I’m going to do what every San Franciscan does who does to heaven, I’ll look around and say, “It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.”

Herb Caen

That experience of losing home, longing for home, that yearning for meaning and rootedness and identity in a floating world, it's what often makes an immigrant story into an American story.

Andrew Lam