Inlandia Quotes

“That might be the story of Riverside. Tying to fit in with the big boys by accommodating their oversized posteriors.
...
That's how we say it. We say, 'This is a horsey area.'
...
That means go slow. We have feed stores and tack shops and desert, a really beautiful desert. It's the desert that has me here in 909.

Technically, the Badlands is chaparral. The hills are filled with sage, wild mustard, fiddleheads and live oaks. Bobcats, meadowlarks, geckos, horned lizards, red tailed hawks, kestrels, coach whip snakes, king snakes, gopher snakes. Rattlesnakes and coyotes. We don't see rain for seven months of the year and when we do we often flood. In the spring, the hillsa re green. They are layered and gorgeous. This is in contrast to the rest of the year when the hills are brown and ochre and layered and gorgeous.
~ 909, Percival Everett”
― Gayle Wattawa, Inlandia: A Literary Journey Through California's Inland Empire

“Of course she came from somewhere else, came off the prairie in search of something she had seen in a movie or heard on the radio, for this is a Southern California story.
~ Joan Didion, Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”
― Gayle Wattawa, Inlandia: A Literary Journey Through California's Inland Empire

“glowed in the pulsating, never-final twilight
there, at that execrable conjunction
of gasoline and desert air
~ At Barstow, Charles Tomlinson”
― Gayle Wattawa, Inlandia: A Literary Journey Through California's Inland Empire

“In one day you can sit under the trees in a thin dress and be too warm if the sun is at its best, and then be half frozen two hours later if the wind is in earnest and the sun has retired. In the sun, Paradise; in shade, protect yourself!”
― Gayle Wattawa, Inlandia: A Literary Journey Through California's Inland Empire

“On this same line, huge San Bernardino Valencias found their way to the 1884 World's Fair in New Orleans, where they attracted crowds. No one could imagine oranges grown in the western United States. It was then and there, more or less, that the phenomenon of modern Los Angeles began.”
― Gayle Wattawa, Inlandia: A Literary Journey Through California's Inland Empire

“I wanted to someday know the code of her elegance and precision and genius, the prose I admired so much, but I wanted to read about my dreamers in their smog-shrouded pale asphalt streets, in their orange groves where the white blossoms fell around us like stars when the sun was going down, in their canyons where the gods of the mountains, like Tahquitz, waited for revenge, in their silver-hot vineyards and the date groves of Mecca where dark men cut grapes and put paper bags around the date clusters.

And now it is here. Inlandia.”
― Gayle Wattawa, Inlandia: A Literary Journey Through California's Inland Empire