"It's highly competitive to be here. People don't come to California to drop out anymore. It's a very striving place."
"In the luxuriance of a bowl of grapes set out in ritual display, in a bottle of wine, the soil and sunshine of California reached millions for whom that distant place would henceforth be envisioned as a sun-graced land resplendent with the goodness of the fruitful earth."
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Source: Kevin Starr (1986). “Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era”, p.134, Oxford University Press
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"If the Pilgrims had landed in Santa Monica Bay rather than Boston, we'd have six states out here!"
"I believe that's a form of dangerous stereotyping, to ascribe permanent victimhood to any group. Groups have suffered powerful injustice, and yet when you say that, you also have to say that they triumphed, that they prevailed."
"I always thought the women of my age group got short shrift because the women's liberation movement came slightly after. You look at the yearbooks and you see the future homemakers of America - hurray for that - but you also see them in the engineers club. You see minority kids as student body presidents at a time when everyone was supposed to be terminally racist. Yearbooks are genres; they're also folk art, folk documentation."
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"I don't reverberate to victimhood, probably because of my own life. I refused to become a victim myself, so it's not one of my big stories."