City Of Quartz Quotes

What do you know about me? What do you know about love that comes into a life in which everything has become questionable? What is your cheap intoxication compared to that? When falling and falling suddenly changes, when the endless Why becomes the final You, when like a fata morgana above the desert of silence feeling suddenly arises, takes shape, and inexorably the delusion of the blood becomes a landscape compared with which all dreams are pale and commonplace? A landscape of silver, a city of filigree and rose quartz, shining like the bright reflection of blooming blood—what do you know about it? Do you think that one can talk about it so easily? That a glib tongue can quickly press it into a cliché of words or even of feelings? What do you know about graves that open and how one stands in dread of the many colorless empty nights of yesterday—yet they open and no skeletons now lie bleaching there, only earth is there, earth, fertile seeds, and already the first green. What do you know about that? You love the intoxication, the conquest, the Other You that wants to die in you and that will never die, you love the stormy deceit of the blood, but your heart will remain empty because one cannot keep anything that does not grow from within oneself. And not much can grow in a storm. It is in the empty nights of loneliness that it grows, if one does not despair. What do you know about it?

The real function of the prison system, indeed, is not to safeguard communities, but to warehouse hatred for the day when it returns to the street.

There was no ‘linkage’, in other words, between corporate-oriented public investment and the social needs that desperately fought for attention in the rest of the city budget.

Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange. (Viking has my full blessing to use that as a blurb.)

Los Angeles, it should be understood, is not a mere city. On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes and mouth wash. Morrow Mayo

Despite the mountain of gold that has been built downtown, Los Angeles remains vulnerable to the same explosive convergence of street anger, poverty, environmental crisis, and capital flight that made the early 1990s its worth crisis period since the early Depression.

When they reached the Gate at the heart of the Old Square, its quartz archway as clear as a frozen pond, the sun was just hitting its upper edge, refracting and casting small rainbows against one of the buildings flanking it. On Summer Solstice, when the sun lined up perfectly with the Gate, it filled the entire square with rainbows, so many that it was like walking inside a diamond.

Mindless punishment and super-incarceration have been societal disasters: locking away tens of thousands of young people in hyper-violent prisons, dominated by institutionalized race wars, without any semblance of education, rehabilitation or hope. The real function of the prison system, indeed, is not to safeguard communities, but to warehouse hatred for the day when it returns to the street.

Julius explained that the palace rooms where they stood were called Wunderkammers, or wonder rooms. Souvenirs of nature, of travels across continents and seas; jewels and skulls. A show of wealth, intellect, power. The first room had rose-colored glass walls, with rubies and garnets and bloodred drapes of damask. Bowls of blush quartz; semiprecious stone roses running the spectrum of red down to pink, a hard, glittering garden. The vaulted ceiling, a feature of all the ten rooms Julius and Cymbeline visited, was a trompe l'oeil of a rosy sky at down, golden light edging the morning clouds. The next room was of sapphire and sea and sky; lapis lazuli, turquoise and gold and silver. A silver mermaid lounged on the edge of a lapis lazuli bowl fashioned in the shape of an ocean. Venus stood aloft on the waves draped in pearls. There were gold fish and diamond fish and faceted sterling silver starfish. Silvered mirrors edged in silvered mirror. There were opals and aquamarines and tanzanite and amethyst. Seaweed bloomed in shades of blue-green marble. The ceiling was a dome of endless, pale blue. A jungle room of mica and marble followed, with its rain forest of cats made from tiger's-eye, yellow topaz birds, tortoiseshell giraffes with stubby horns of spun gold. Carved clouds of smoky quartz hovered over a herd of obsidian and ivory zebras. Javelinas of spotted pony hide charged tiny, life-sized dik-diks with velvet hides, and dazzling diamond antlers mingled with miniature stuffed sable minks. Agate columns painted a medley of dark greens were strung with faceted ropes of green gold. A room of ivory: bone, teeth, skulls, and velvet. A room crowded with columns all sheathed in mirrors, reflecting world maps and globes and atlases inlaid with silver, platinum, and white gold; the rubies and diamonds that were sometimes set to mark the location of a city or a town of conquest resembled blood and tears. A room dominated by a fireplace large enough to hold several people, upholstered in velvets and silks the colors of flame. Snakes of gold with orange sapphire and yellow topaz eyes coiled around the room's columns. Statues of smiling black men in turbans offering trays of every gem imaginable-emerald, sapphire, ruby, topaz, diamond-stood at the entrance to a room upholstered in pistachio velvet, accented with malachite, called the Green Vault. Peridot wood nymphs attended to a Diana carved from a single pure crystal of quartz studded with tiny tourmalines. Jade tables, and jade lanterns. The royal jewels, blinding in their sparkling excess: crowns, tiaras, coronets, diadems, heavy ceremonial necklaces, rings, and bracelets that could span a forearm, surrounding the world's largest and most perfect green diamond. Above it all was a night sky of painted stars, with inlaid cut crystal set in a serious of constellations.

Here, one wants to create the Paris of the Far West. Evening traffic on Hollywood Boulevard attempts to mimic Parisian boulevard life. However, life on the Boulevard is extinct before midnight, and the seats in front of the cafes, where in Paris one can watch street life in a leisurely manner, are missing. . . . At night the illuminated portraits of movie stars stare down from lampposts upon crowds dressed in fake European elegance – a declaration that America yearns to be something other than American here. . . . Yet, in spite of the artists, writers and aspiring film stars, the sensibility of a real Montmartre, Soho, or even Greenwich Village, cannot be felt here. The automobile mitigates against such a feeling, and so do the new houses. Hollywood lacks the patina of age.75

We live in a rich society with poor children, and that should be intolerable.

Perhaps. Once when I was a child,” says Pandey, “I was walking along a dry creek bed. I walked it many times in my youth, but that day I saw one of the creek bed walls had fallen in, General. And inside this wall, in all the loose earth piled there, were dozens and dozens of crystals. Quartz, of course. I didn’t know that it was a commonly found thing, not then. I couldn’t imagine something like this just existing. You know? It was beautiful and wonderful to me, because I didn’t know any better. So now, faced with this strange stuff, I have to wonder if we just don’t know any better.

At the end of the day, the best measure of the humanity of any society is the life and happiness of its children. We live in a rich society with poor children, and that should be intolerable.

tugging her through the crowds and toward the real tourist draw of the Gate. Jutting out of the quartz about four feet off the ground lay the dial pad: a solid-gold block embedded with seven different gems, each for a different quarter of the city, the insignia of each district etched beneath it. Emerald and a rose for Five Roses. Opal and a pair of wings for the CBD. Ruby and a heart for the Old Square. Sapphire and an oak tree for Moonwood. Amethyst and a human hand for Asphodel Meadows. Tiger’s-eye and a serpent for the Meat Market. And onyx—so black it gobbled the light—and a set of skull and crossbones for the Bone Quarter.

Bryce raised her eyes to the bronze plaque above her head. The quartz Gates were memorials, though she didn’t know for which conflict or war. But each bore the same plaque: The power shall always belong to those who give their lives to the city.

But Tikal was just one of many Mesoamerican city states that boasted sophisticated urban life. They developed glyphic writing (using logograms to represent words), charted the stars and created a calendar, celebrating their festivals according to their knowledge of the heavens. They lived on maize, tomatoes, beans, and drank chocolate. In their workshops, they crafted obsidian, volcanic glass, into weapons, tools, jewels and mirrors, and they spun cotton, which they traded, along with slaves, to their neighbours. They were skilled dentists, inserting turquoise and quartz into their front teeth so firmly that they remain in Maya skeletons. They knew of the wheel, but they did not use it for travel, only for children’s toys, yet they built straight, raised roads, known as white roads, to reflect the Milky Way.

A sarcophagus made of clear quartz lay in the center of the space. And inside it, preserved in eternal youth and beauty, lay a dark-haired female.

In 1935 the famous radical author Lewis Corey (née Louis Fraina) announced in his Crisis of the Middle Class that the Jeffersonian Dream was moribund: ‘That middle-class ideal is gone beyond recall. The United States today is a nation of employees and of propertyless dependents.’ As jobless accountants and ruined stockbrokers stood in the same breadlines as truckdrivers and steelworkers, much of the babbitry of the 1920s was left with little to eat except for obsolete class pride. Corey warned that the downwardly mobile middle stratum, ‘at war with itself’, was approaching a radical crossroads, and would turn either toward socialism or fascism.36

In "The Devil's Presence," Goldsborough brilliantly captures the Zeitgeist of our troubled times, writing with an honesty and passion that will stir your soul and rekindle your belief that a better world is within our grasp. Richard Feinberg, former White House and State Department official, official book reviewer for "Foreign Affairs." Put "Blood and Oranges" on the L.A. shelf next to Mike Davis' "City of Quartz," a Raymond Chandler or two and a DVD of "Chinatown." Just dive in. And hold on. Arthur Salm, former book editor, "San Diego Union Tribune." The Paris Herald'" is a witty, tender and evocative portrait of Americans in Paris that vividly brings to life the city they loved and made their own. Ronald Steel, author of "Walter Lippmann and the American Century." "Waiting for Uncle John" is a wonderful story that should be read and reread, told and retold. The Cuban people will never support an invader." Alejandro Orfila, former Secretary General of the Organization of American States. "Misfortunes of Wealth" is wonderfully structured and written, a gripping work of social history. I was utterly absorbed while reading it and have been haunted by it ever since. Beth Gutcheon, author of eleven novels including "Still Missing" and "Leeway Cottage." "Rebel Europe" is the most important book I have read in years. Charles Champlain, "The Los Angeles Times.

Jutting out of the quartz about four feet off the ground lay the dial pad: a solid-gold block embedded with seven different gems, each for a different quarter of the city, the insignia of each district etched beneath it. Emerald and a rose for Five Roses. Opal and a pair of wings for the CBD. Ruby and a heart for the Old Square. Sapphire and an oak tree for Moonwood. Amethyst and a human hand for Asphodel Meadows. Tiger’s-eye and a serpent for the Meat Market. And onyx—so black it gobbled the light—and a set of skull and crossbones for the Bone Quarter.

The ultimate world-historical significance - and oddity - of Los Angeles is that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism.

Hypaxia whispered, “I don’t think it’s a memorial plaque. On the Gate.” The witch pointed to the sign mounted on the glowing quartz, the bronze stark against the incandescent stone. “The power shall always belong to those who give their lives to the city.” Bryce dropped further into power. Past the normal, respectable levels. Queen Hypaxia said, “The plaque is a blessing.” Declan’s breathing was uneven as he murmured, “The power of the Gates—the power given over by every soul who has ever touched it … every soul who has handed over a drop of their magic.” He tried and failed to calculate just how many people, over how many centuries, had touched the Gates in the city. Had handed over a drop of their power, like a coin tossed in a fountain. Made a wish on that drop of yielded power.

Micah hadn’t just opened a portal to Hel in the Heart Gate. He’d opened one in every Gate. Every one of the seven quartz arches was a doorway to Hel.

Jesiba studied him for a long moment, then frowned. “And Hunt Athalar?” Aidas fell silent as a petitioner stumbled past, hoping to beat the crowds that had filled the Oracle’s Park and Luna’s Temple since portals to his world had opened within the quartz Gates and the beasts of the Pit had taken full advantage of it. Any who had managed to return were currently being punished by one of Aidas’s brothers. He would soon return to join them in it. Aidas said at last, “I think Athalar’s father would have been proud.” “Sentimental of you.” Aidas shrugged as best his feline body

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