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

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.

Rumi 

 

 

When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.

Elizabeth Bowen

 

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

What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.

H.L. Mencken

 

I don't think San Francisco needs defending. I never meet anyone who doesn't love the place, Americans or others. 

Doris Lessing

San Francisco owes its fabled beauty to nature more than any other source.  Hills,  fog,  and water define the city.  But nature,  of course,  both acts upon San Francisco and is acted upon by it. Virtually none of the landscape is as it was when the Ohlone lived off the land:  even the city's forests were imported,  to make the environment appear gentler and more like places that settlers had left behind.
   But as we are reminded every time the earth quakes,  nature is not gentle,  and the changes wrought by natural forces dwarf any that humans have made on the terrain.  Take San Francisco Bay. Twenty-five thousand years ago,  before the end of the last Ice Age,  it wasn’t a bay at all,  but a valley carved out by the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers.  Their currents flowed through the Golden Gate and clear out to today’s Farallon Islands before joining the ocean.  That ocean created and carried the sand upon which San Francisco is built---sand in drifts so deep that today’s Richmond and Sunset districts may well lie over buried rock peaks.  The glaciers melted;  water filled the valley and made a bay,  and on that bay floated Spanish boats towards what would one day be San Francisco.  

THE GREAT SAN FRANCISCO Trivia & Fact Book

by Janet Bailey

 

 

. . . 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

 

 

I fell in love with the most cordial sociable city in the Union.  After the sagebrush and alkali deserts of Washoe, San Francisco was paradise to me.   

Mark Twain

 

Romance is thinking about your significant other, when you are supposed to be thinking about something else.

Nicholas Sparks

You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.

Dr. Seuss

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

Langston Hughes

 

San Francisco is a city where people are never more abroad than when they are at home.

Benjamin F. Taylor

Love is what still goes on when you're not horny.

Robert A. Heinlein

That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.

Robert Louis Stevenson

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

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

Herb Caen

 

We are most alive when we're in love.

John Updike

 

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

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

Love loves to love love.

James Joyce

 

 

I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.

Martin Luther King Jr.

 

Life is short. Kiss slowly, laugh insanely, love truly and forgive quickly.

Paulo Coelho

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.

Thomas Merton

To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.

David Viscott

It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world.

Oscar Wilde

 

I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they're right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.

Marilyn Monroe

 

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

 

 

San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality.   

Paul Kantner of the rock band Jefferson Airplane

One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours? I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life.

Khalil Gibran

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.

W. H. Auden

 

 

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

Herb Caen

 

 

 

 

Alcatraz Island

NO more jazz
At Alcatraz
No more piano
For Lucky Luciano
No more trombone
For Al Capone
No more jazz 
At Alcatraz
No more cello
For Frank Costello
No more screeching of the 
Seagulls
As they line up for 
Chow
No more jazz
At  Alcatraz

NO MORE JAZZ AT ALCATRAZ  

Bob Kaufman (n.d.)

My wild-knight neon twinkle fate there, ah, and then finally at dawn of a Sunday and they did call me, the immense girders of Oakland Bay still haunting me and all that eternity too much to swallow and not knowing who I am at all.     

Jack Kerouac

 

Some people become San Franciscans almost immediately,  feeling the poetry,  sensing the specialness,  seeing what makes the city great and not so great,  boning up on the history and walking the streets with glamorous ghosts at their elbows.  Others can live here all their lives and never get the message.

Herb Caen

 

 

 

East is East, and West is San Francisco.

O. Henry

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

 

 

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

Robert Heinlein

It is a good thing the early settlers landed on the East Coast; if they’d landed in San Francisco first, the rest of the country would still be uninhabited.

Herbert Mye

 

This is the season in which I like San Francisco best;  although we’re normally a Californian city,  there’s a certain dreamy quality to the place that’s often at odds with the matter-of-factness of sunny day after sunny say.  After all,  aren’t we supposed to be the cool grey city of love?    

Laurel Wellman

 

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

Love is when the desire to be desired takes you so badly that you feel you could die of it.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

 

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

Herb Caen

 

There is no logic to San Francisco generally, a city built with putty and pipe cleaners, rubber cement and colored construction paper. Its the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new crayons.

Dave Eggers, A Heartbeaking Work of Staggering Genius

Coming home from other cities and other parts,  one crosses the bay to reach San Francisco and sees first the gray silhouette of her hills,  shingled with roofs and roofs and roofs;  the royal fringe of masts and spars along her waterfronts;  the gray fog circling and fuming softly over it all,  and the gulls flying and crying.  The little boats plying to and fro,  sound their hoarse,  sweet notes of warning,  and perhaps the noon whistles and the Angelus bells take up the sound in a long chord that to some hearts say,  “Welcome home!” 
    Each to his own city.  But do you love them as we do,  I wonder,  you whose cities are not steep and narrowed streeted,  scented with the spices of the Orient and the good tarry smell of ships and fishing,  lulled by the deep rushing of ocean surges on a long beach,  the lapping of the bay waters against piers?       

MY SAN FRANCISCO   

Kathleen Norris 1932

 

San Francisco is unique---a thing without a parallel, one that admits of no comparisons, for there is nothing like it in the histories of cities.

William M’Collum, M.D.

 

 

San Francisco was not just a wide open town.  It is the only city in the United States which was not settled overland by the westward–spreading puritan tradition . . . 
It had been settled mostly, in spite of the romances of the overland migration, by gamblers,  prostitutes,  rascals,  immigrants,  and fortune seekers who came across the Isthmus and around the Horn.  

They had their faults, but they were not influenced by Cotton Mather.   

Kenneth Rexroth   Beat poet

Your city is remarkable not only for its beauty.  It is also, of all the cities in the United States,  the one whose name,  the world over,  conjures up the most visions and more than any other,  incites one to dream.     

Georges Pompidou

 

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

 

San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. 

William Saroyan

 

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

James Baldwin

I think San Francisco is the best place in the whole world for an easy life. 

Imogen Cunningham

The bay of San Francisco has been celebrated from the time of its first discovery as one of the finest in the world. It rises into an importance far above that of a mere harbor. . . Its latitude position is that of Lisbon, Its climate that of Southern Italy, settlements attest to its healthfulness, bold shores and mountains give it grandeur, the extent and fertility of its dependent country give it great resources for agriculture, commerce, and population. . . To this gate I gave the name Chrysopylae or Golden Gate. . .

John Fremont 

Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backward.

e.e. cummings

You wouldn't think such a place as San Francisco could exist. The wonderful sunlight there, the hills, the great bridges, the Pacific at you shoes. . . The lobsters, clams, and crabs. Oh, Cat, what food for you. Every kind of seafood there is.  

Dylan Thomas, in a letter to his wife, Caitlin

 

It has been said that all great cities of history have been built on bodies of water-Rome on the Tiber, Paris on the Seine, London on the Thames, New York on the Hudson. If this is the criterion of a city’s greatness, surely San Francisco ranks in the first magnitude among cities of the world. For never was a metropolis more dominated by any natural feature than San Francisco by its bay.

Harold Gillian

 

As if you were on fire from within. The moon lives in the lining of your skin.

Pablo Neruda