Cool Gray City of Love Quotes

“For cities are museums of time, and to live in them is to be haunted by the places they once were. The waterways that existed before the skyscrapers and freeways are a vanished world that beacons to us. When we catch glimpses of them, the city disappears. Its too-known streets dissolve into unfathomable terrain. It becomes innocent again. We want to unmake the city. To regain a lost paradise.”
― Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

“I have spent much of my life exploring San Francisco. But perhaps it is better not to see everything. To let a small mystery stand in for the great one. To know that somewhere far below, down where the sea crashes endlessly into the land, is a rock that I will never climb.”
― Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

“Great cities invite you to love them in extreme close-up, to love every inch of them. And the more eccentric, convoluted, broken, and uneven they are, the more there is to love. The tenements on the Lower East Side in New York City, the decaying wooden houses above the waterfront in Istanbul, the fading rose-colored buildings in the magical little grid south of the Spanish Steps in Rome, the bombed-out villas near the Vucciria in Palermo—it is precisely the irregularity of these places that allows your heart to get a grip on them, like a climber finding a tiny hold that will not give way. Shimmering Venice has the most beautiful inches of any city in the world. San Francisco cannot compete, because it does not have streets made of water. But it has the next best thing: It has dirt trails. They make this city a place where mystery is measured in soft footsteps, and magic in clouds of dust.”
― Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

“In 1997, a killer whale killed a great white shark off the Farallones, the Super Bowl of species conflict on planet Earth.”
― Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

“Above all, San Francisco was alive. The painter John David Borthwick said of it, “People lived more there in a week than they would in a year in most other places.”
― Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

“Tho the dark be cold and blind Yet her sea-fog’s touch is kind, And her mightier caress Is joy and the pain thereof; And great is thy tenderness, O cool, grey city of love!”
― Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

“the Tenderloin is a large turd—often a literal one—floating in the crystal punchbowl that is San Francisco.”
― Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

“As I walk her streets, the only thing that keeps me from stopping on every block and throwing my hands in the air in amazement are the old Jacob Marley chains we all clank around in, chains forged not so much by sin as by the weight of the weary world. But San Francisco, like the ghosts who visit Scrooge, always offers me another chance. In San Francisco, it is always Christmas morning.”
― Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

“San Francisco, by contrast, is all about the collision between man and the universe. It is on auto-derive. Anarchic, blown-out, naked, it shuffles its own crazy deck. To walk the streets is to be constantly hurled into different worlds without event trying. As William Saroyan wrote, "The city has the temperament of a genius. It's unpredictable. Any street is liable to leap upwards at any time . . . It is a city with no rules. Like nature itself it improvises as it goes along.”
― Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

“More than any city I know, San Francisco is made up of discrete neighborhoods, each with its own unique aura. The main reason for this is its terrain. Its convoluted landscape defines San Francisco's neighborhoods, endowing each of them with a specific terroir.”
― Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

“This has always been a city of thoughtful rogues, greedy do-gooders, irreverent theologians, socialist entrepreneurs, hedonistic environmentalists, sensitive newspapermen, philosophical rockers, and high-minded sensualists. And through the years, these mavericks have carried, like an unruly band of Olympic torchbearers, the rebellious, restless, life-affirming fire that was lit in 1849.”
― Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

“San Francisco’s famous tolerance, its embrace of oddballs and outcasts of all stripes, its impatience with East Coast notions of propriety, can be traced back to the radical egalitarianism of its early days.”
― Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

“And the San Francisco that I keep in my heart, the San Francisco that I will take with me even if I never see her again, is the city that is a window open to the world.”
― Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

“For a place can only summon up the past. What you do with those memories is up to you.”
― Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

“The painter John David Borthwick said of it, “People lived more there in a week than they would in a year in most other places.”
― Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

“Spearheading the assault on this legendarily bleak and intractable stretch was Twitter, which in June 2012 moved 800 employees into a building between 9th and 10th Streets. Though mid-Market is on the Tenderloin’s borders, the move was a portent. It struck me as ironic that a social media company, specializing in creating disembodied “communities,” might simultaneously destroy and revitalize the neighborhood that had once been a dense nexus of city life.”
― Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

“Burnham famously said, “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized.”
― Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

“I never saw a purple cow, I never hope to see one; But I can tell you anyhow, I’d rather see than be one”
― Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

“I may not be a competent judge, but this much I will say, that I have seen purer liquors, better segars, finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier courtesans, here in San Francisco, than in any other place I have ever visited; and it is my unbiased opinion that California can and does furnish the best bad things that are attainable in America.”
― Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

“Food was also expensive: In the summer of 1849, a dozen eggs cost $12 and a loaf of bread worth 5 cents cost 50 cents. Most of the city’s inhabitants were bachelors who were remarkably (but typically for their time) innocent of even the most rudimentary knowledge of cooking, cleaning, or anything domestic. As a result—and because few lodgings had cooking facilities—almost everyone ate in restaurants. (It is said that this is the origin of San Francisco’s tradition as a great restaurant town.) There were culinary establishments for every taste and budget, from the high-end Delmonico’s, where a meal could cost $10, to filthy dives where $1 would buy a meal of boiled beef, bread, and coffee. Many men ate standing up at street stands. Others frequented the “Celestial” (Chinese) restaurants that had already begun to open.”
― Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco