What was the use of my having come from Oakland, it was not natural to have come from there, yes, write about it if I like or anything, if I like, but not there, there is no there there.
Places Quotes
Approaching Adelaide we dismounted from the train, as the French say, and were driven in an open carriage over the hills and along their slopes to the city. It was an excursion of an hour or two, and the charm of it could not be overstated, I think. The road wound around the gaps and […]
Africa always brings something new.
On San Francisco: . . .this gold and white acropolis rising wave on wave against the blue of the Pacific sky was a stunning thing, a painted thing like a picture of a medieval Italian city which can never have existed. I stopped in a parking place to look at her and the necklace bridge […]
When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it’s always twenty years behind the times. (often erroneously attributed to Mark Twain)
Ask where’s the North? At York tis on the Tweed; In Scotland at the Orcades; and there, At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where.
In the Valley of the Kings, every sarcophagus is broken and the bones of the kings of Egypt are scattered. In one I picked up a skull. I mused over it a moment, and handed it to Paul, who moralized at large. ‘That man,’ said he, ‘once talked and laughed and sang and danced, and […]
I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts.
What a bewitching thing is a city of the sea. It was good to be in Seattle – to hear the foghorns on the Sound, and the deep bellow of departing steamers; to feel the creeping fog all around you, the fog that softens things and makes a velvet trance out of nighttime.
Chicago is stupefying… an Olympian freak, a fable, an allegory, an incomprehensible phenomenon… monstrous, multifarous, unnatural, indomitable, puissant, preposterous, transcendent… throw the dictionary at it!
