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 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 

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

Maya Angelou

 

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

Frank Dillane

 

 

Queen of the Pacific Coast! Fair city whose changing skies for half the year shower down mist and rain, and the other half sunbeams of molten brass! Metropolis of alternate sticky mud and blinding dust! In spite of these and more thou art a city of my heart, O Ciudad de San Francisco!

T.S. Kenderdine

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

 

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

 

 

The truth is you don't know what is going to happen tomorrow. 

Life is a crazy ride, and nothing is guaranteed. 

Eminem

 

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

 

 

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

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

Peace, that was the other name for home.

 Kathleen Norris

The water colored twilight, with pelicans and Alcatraz on San Francisco Bay, 
as seen from Treasure Island. 
In the chilly air, 
I catch through my lens, 
the sense of an infinite profoundness, 
like a falling star. 
Go figure.  

R H 

 

 

As the years went by, San Francisco became not only my city but also my way of life. From the time I was a boy, I wanted to live in a place like my father's theater world, a magic box filled with lavishly made-up women, extravagant gay men, and other larger-than-life characters. I wanted a world that could encompass all worlds. I found something close to it in this soft-lit city in the ocean mists.

David Talbot,   Season of the Witch

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

Robert Montgomery

 

 

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

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

Jack Kerouac

 

Where thou art, that is home. 

Emily Dickinson

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

 

 

It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time. 

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

 

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

Herb Caen

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

Pras Michel

 

 

Home is where the heart is. 

Pliny the Elder

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

 

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

San Francisco is the only city I can think of that can survive all the things you people are doing to it and still look beautiful. 

 Frank Lloyd Wright

There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort. 

Jane Austen

 

 

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

Pras Michel

 

 

 

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

Louisa May Alcott

 

 

 

 

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

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

 

There is no place more delightful than home. 

Marcus Tillius Cicero

 

 

 

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

I went to San Francisco

I saw the bridges high, 

Spun across the water

Like cobwebs in the sky. 

Langston Hughes

 

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

 

A house is made with walls and beams; a home is built with love and dreams. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

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

First time we came here, we walked the streets all day — all over town — and nobody hassled us. People smiled, friendly-like, and we knew we could live here… Los Angeles? That’s just a big parking lot where you buy a hamburger for a trip to San Francisco… And the beautiful old houses and the strange light. We’ve never been in a city with light like this. We sit in our hotel room for hours, watching the fog come in, the light change.

John Lennon, speaking for himself and Yoko Ono

 

 

 

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

 

 

San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality.   

Paul Kantner of the rock band Jefferson Airplane

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

Benjamin F. Taylor

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

Rosalynn Carter

 

 

 

If you're alive, you can't be bored in San Francisco. If you're not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life. 

William Saroyan

 

 

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

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

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

 

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

William Bennett

 

 

 

 

 

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 

  

 

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

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

Doris Lessing

 

 

. . . 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

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

John Howard Payne

 

 

 

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

 Herb Caen

 

 

I do not understand how anyone can live without one small place of enchantment to turn to.

 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

The city is like a snake, shedding its skin, changing constantly, moving about in unexpected directions. However, if it is a great city, which San Francisco forever is, it retains its basic qualities---a sense of adventure, a delight in its own history, an air of freedom and a rare tolerance for divergent views and actions. The city dances on its hills and unashamedly enjoys its own beauty, which has survived many a long night of excesses, both joyous and tragic.
    San Francisco, a great writer’s town---tantalizing, just out of reach in its misty aloofness. A city so small and yet so varied, from block to block. Cross a street and enter a different world. Every writer about San Francisco strives to capture its essence and, on occasion, feels he has succeeded---but the city is always one step ahead, laughing, disappearing into the fog.    

Herb Caen  

 

 

 

 

San Franciscans are very proud of their city, and they should be. It’s the most beautiful place in the world. 

Robert Redford

 

 

When you're in love with a city, you grope for shadows that vanish at first touch.

Herb Caen

Home isn’t where you’re from, it’s where you find light when all grows dark.

 Pierce Brown

The home should be the treasure chest of living. 

Le Corbusier

 

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.  The concert.  Go to a movie 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)

San Francisco

It's like Paris — it's soft, the breeze blows, the city may swelter but the hillers do fly — over the bay is Oakland (ah me Hart Crane Melville and all ye assorted brother poets of the American night that once I thought would be my sacrificial altar and now it is but who's to care, know, and I lost love because of it — drunkard, dullard, poet) . . .

Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans