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

Herb Caen

The Ferry Building

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.

Paul Valery

 

 

“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.

 

“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

 

To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.

Lao Tzu

“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

 

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.

Buddha

 

Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill

 

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.

Joseph Campbell

 

Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”

Dr. Seuss

Alcatraz Island Federal Penitentiary

 

 

When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.

Buddha

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  

by Bob Kaufman (n.d.)

 

“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

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

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   

By Kathleen Norris 1932

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

 

 

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

Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.

Emily Dickinson

 

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

 

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

 

Every hour of every day is an unspeakably perfect miracle.

Walt Whitman

 

Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.

Ernest Holmes

 

 

 

 

Everything you can imagine is real.

Pablo Picasso

 

 

We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep. 

William Shakespeare

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.

Marcus Aurelius

 

This whole universe, with all its vastness, grandeur and beauty, is nothing but sheer imagination. In spite of so many discoveries, researches and scientific knowledge, the creation remains a great unsolved riddle.

Meher Baba

Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.

Hans Christian Andersen

 

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

Henry David Thoreau

 

To the one who knows how to look and feel, every moment of this free wandering life is an enchantment.

Alexandra David Neel

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Henry David Thoreau

 

 

Northwestern edge of Alcatraz Island

 

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

Marcus Aurelius

In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary.

Aaron Rose

 

 

The 1969 Alcatraz Indian Occupation of Alcatraz Island

"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 

The San Francisco skyline as seen from near Alcatraz Island

“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

Northeastern side of Alcatraz Island

 

“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

Shut your eyes and see.

James Joyce

 

 

 

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

 

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

Thornton Wilder

 

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 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)

 

San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality.   

Paul Kantner of the rock band Jefferson Airplane

 

“. . . 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

 

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

Albert Einstein

 

If you're reading this...

Congratulations, you're alive.

If that's not something to smile about,

then I don't know what is.

Chad Sugg

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset."

Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior and orator

What is past is prologue. 

William Shakespeare