The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.

As rain falls equally on the just and the unjust, do not burden your heart with judgements but rain your kindness equally on all.

In San Francisco one felt the spirit of optimism and enterprise. Los Angeles, on the other hand, was an ugly city, hot and oppressive, and the people looked sallow and anaemic. It was a much warmer climate but had not the freshness of San Francisco; nature has endowed the north of California with resources that will endure and flourish when Hollywood has disappeared into the prehistoric tar-pits of Wilshire Boulevard.

There is hardship in everything except eating pancakes.

Dean's California — wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors.

The West Coast experience is soft and peripheral, New York is hard and concentrated. California is a small woman saying, “Fuck me.” New York is a large man saying, “Fuck you!

There’s a passage in John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” that does a pretty good job describing California’s rainfall patterns:

The water came in a 30-year cycle. There would be five to six wet and wonderful years when there might be 19 to 25 inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of 12 to 16 inches of rain. And then the dry years would come ...

It's a noir world. Unfair things happen.

"The world is unfair, said Meryem. "If a stone falls on an egg, it is bad for the egg; if an egg falls on a stone, it is still bad for the egg.

perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.

California is a small woman saying, 'Fuck me.' New York is a large man saying, 'Fuck you!

Best way to live in California is to be from somewheres else.

I often think how unfairly life's good fortune is sometimes distributed.

There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.