San Andreas Quotes

Only once in the historical record has a jump on the San Andreas exceeded the jump of 1906. In 1857, near Tejon Pass outside Los Angeles, the two sides shifted thirty feet.

Alec didn't normally consider himself a violent man, but sometimes, arms simply needed to be removed.

The city of Los Angeles is now some twenty-four hundred miles south of central Alaska, and since it is moving slowly northward as the San Andreas fault slides irresistibly along, the city is destined eventually to become part of Alaska. If

Where you’re concerned, my name is San Andreas.

You’re not writing your own story, you’re living with the disappointment of failing someone else’s outline.

On the average, one thousand people settle on or near the San Andreas Fault each day. Nowhere in the United States is the density of population greater than in San Francisco and its environs. Nowhere is disregard of the danger more apparent.

We, the weird and the sideways folk, have always walked the line of rejection. It’s what makes us visionaries. We who are pushed away, to the edge, can see beyond the borders of reality. We frighten the privileged with our possibilities.” Bryan

The suspicion that a calamity might also be a punishment is further useful in that it allows an infinity of speculation. After New Orleans, which suffered from a lethal combination of being built below sea level and neglected by the Bush administration, I learned from a senior rabbi in Israel that it was revenge for the evacuation of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, and from the mayor of New Orleans (who had not performed his own job with exceptional prowess) that it was god’s verdict on the invasion of Iraq. You can nominate your own favorite sin here, as did the “reverends” Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell after the immolation of the World Trade Center. In that instance, the proximate cause was to be sought and found in America’s surrender to homosexuality and abortion. (Some ancient Egyptians believed that sodomy was the cause of earthquakes: I expect this interpretation to revive with especial force when the San Andreas Fault next gives a shudder under the Gomorrah of San Francisco.)

From a Berkeley Notebook' ~Denis Johnson One changes so much from moment to moment that when one hugs oneself against the chill air at the inception of spring, at night, knees drawn to chin, he finds himself in the arms of a total stranger, the arms of one he might move away from on the dark playground. Also, it breaks the heart that the sign revolving like a flame above the gas station remembers the price of gas, but forgets entirely this face it has been looking at all day. And so the heart is exhausted that even the face of the dismal facts we wait for the loves of the past to come walking from the fire, the tree, the stone, tangible and unchanged and repentant but what can you do. Half the time I think about my wife and child, the other half I think how to become a citizen with an apartment, and sex too is quite on my mind, though it seems the women have no time for you here, for which in my larger, more mature moments I can’t blame them. These are the absolute Pastures I am led to: I am in Berkeley, California, trapped inside my body, I am the secret my body is going to keep forever, as if its secret were merely silence. It lies between two mistakes of the earth, the San Andreas and Hayward faults, and at night from the hill above the stadium where I sleep, I can see the yellow aurora of Telegraph Avenue uplifted by the holocaust. My sleeping bag has little cowboys lassoing bulls embroidered all over its pastel inner lining, the pines are tall and straight, converging in a sort of roof above me, it’s nice, oh loves, oh loves, why aren’t you here? Morgan, my pyjamas are so lonesome without the orangutans—I write and write, and transcend nothing, escape nothing, nothing is truly born from me, yet magically it’s better than nothing—I know you must be quite changed by now, but you are just the same, too, like those stars that keep shining for a long time after they go out—but it’s just a light they touch us with this evening amid the fine rain like mist, among the pines.

Can’t you tell from the hair and the cheekbones? Humans don’t grow that beautiful. Not outside of Denmark, anyway.

He'd never had anyone come apart beneath him like that -- it was so beautiful.

Marvin cocked his golden head thoughtfully. “So, how deep in the closet are you?” Alec gave him an expressive look. “Honey, I shit mothballs.

Funny word, that: "fault." As in San Andreas. The crack through which one world intersects with the next, or vice versa. This crack in my head, still gaping open--a magnet, a haematoma, a dark and spreading pool. A cigarette-burn hole in the fabric of everything I see, or hear, or do; right in the middle, impossible to mend, impossible to disguise. Impossible to ignore.

Trebala joj je tišina. Dok god ju nitko nije tjerao da priča o tome, bilo je kao da se nikada nije ni dogodilo. Baš kao san, zaboravljen netom nakon što se probudiš i nikoga više nije briga što si vrištao.

The suspicion that a calamity might also be a punishment is further useful in that it allows an infinity of speculation. After New Orleans, which suffered from a lethal combination of being built below sea level and neglected by the Bush administration, I learned from a senior rabbi in Israel that it was revenge for the evacuation of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, and from the mayor of New Orleans (who had not performed his own job with exceptional prowess) that it was god’s verdict on the invasion of Iraq. You can nominate your own favorite sin here, as did the “reverends” Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell after the immolation of the World Trade Center. In that instance, the proximate cause was to be sought and found in America’s surrender to homosexuality and abortion. (Some ancient Egyptians believed that sodomy was the cause of earthquakes: I expect this interpretation to revive with especial force when the San Andreas Fault next gives a shudder under the Gomorrah of San Francisco.) When the debris had eventually settled on Ground Zero, it was found that two pieces of mangled girder still stood in the shape of a cross, and much wondering comment resulted. Since all architecture has always involved crossbeams, it would be surprising only if such a feature did not emerge. I admit that I would have been impressed if the wreckage had formed itself into a Star of David or a star and crescent, but there is no record of this ever having occurred anywhere, even in places where local people might be impressed by it. And remember, miracles are supposed to occur at the behest of a being who is omnipotent as well as omniscient and omnipresent. One might hope for more magnificent performances than ever seem to occur.

Each scenario is about fifteen million years into the future, and each assumes that the Pacific Plate will continue to move northwest at about 2.0 inches per year relative to the interior of North America. In scenario 1, the San Andreas fault is the sole locus of motion. Baja California and coastal California shear away from the rest of the continent to form a long, skinny island. A short ferry ride across the San Andreas Strait connects LA to San Francisco. In scenario 2, all of California west of the Sierra Nevada, together with Baja California, shears away to the northwest. The Gulf of California becomes the Reno Sea, which divides California from Nevada. The scene is reminiscent of how the Arabian Peninsula split from Africa to open the Red Sea some 5 million years ago. In scenario 3, central Nevada splits open through the middle of the Basin and Range province. The widening Gulf of Nevada divides the continent form a large island composed of Washington, Oregon, California, Baja California, and western Nevada. The scene is akin to Madagascar’s origin when it split form eastern Africa to open the Mozambique Channel.

C’est après cette soirée que vous avez commencé à m’écrire des lettres. Beaucoup de lettres. Quelquefois une chaque jour. C’était des lettres très courtes, dessortes de billets, c’était, oui, des sortes d’appels criés d’un lieu invivable, mortel, d’une sorte de désert. Ces appels étaient d’une évidente beauté. Je ne vous répondais pas. Je gardais toutes les lettres. Il y avait en haut des pages le nom de l’endroit où elles avaient été écrites et l’heure ou le temps : Soleil ou Pluie. Ou Froid. Ou : Seul. Et puis une fois, vous êtes resté longtemps sans écrire. Un mois peut-être, je ne sais plus pour ce temps-là ce qu’il avait duré

This kind of speculation reached a high point with the Pentagon's initiative of creating a 'futures market in events', a stock market of prices for terrorist attacks or catastrophes. You bet on the probable occurrence of such events against those who don't believe they'll happen. This speculative market is intended to operate like the market in soya or sugar. You might speculate on the number of AIDS victims in Africa or on the probability that the San Andreas Fault will give way (the Pentagon's initiative is said to derive from the fact that they credit the free market in speculation with better forecasting powers than the secret services). Of course it is merely a step from here to insider trading: betting on the event before you cause it is still the surest way (they say Bin Laden did this, speculating on TWA shares before 11 September). It's like taking out life insurance on your wife before you murder her. There's a great difference between the event that happens (happened) in historical time and the event that happens in the real time of information. To the pure management of flows and markets under the banner of planetary deregulation, there corresponds the 'global' event- or rather the globalized non-event: the French victory in the World Cup, the year 2000, the death of Diana, The Matrix, etc. Whether or not these events are manufactured, they are orchestrated by the silent epidemic of the information networks. Fake events.

U Parizu su postojale dve vrste snobizma, naročito među izvesnim piscima. Jedan se sastojao u tome da ljudi izigravaju katolike, što su činili čak i pojedini pisci govoreći o takozvanoj krizi katolicizma, koja je kao za inat postajala dublja što je više opadao ugled dotičnog pisca. Drugi snobizam, kome su bili potpuno naklonjeni nadrealisti, sastojao se u tome da ljudi izigravaju ateiste i antiklerikalce. U to vreme je u Parizu živeo jedan čudnovat sveštenik, verovatno malo pomerenog uma, koji je svaki čas it Sen-Silpisa odlazio na Velike bulevare i tamo cepao časopise kao La Vie Parisienne ili La Rire, izložene na kioscima, jer je smatrao da su opasni za moral dobrih hrišćana. Razumljivo, vlasnik kioska se bunio i tražio da sveštenik plati pocepane časopise, ali umesto novaca je dobijao samo zapenjene govorancije o dekadenciji i nemoralu našeg doba. Naposletku bi se pojavio policajac i u najbližu policijsku stanicu odvodio sveštenika moralistu i vlasnika kioska. Svaki put kada bi do ušiju Andrea Bretona stigao glas o nekom od takvih skandalapomenutog sveštenika, on bi odmah izdavao naređenje mladom Desnosu – koji je inače bio spreman na sve radi pobede nadrealizma – da ode u četvrt San-Silpis i pocepa sve crkvene časopise i novine na kioscima.

Approximately 50 percent of Americans have some form of insulin resistance, according to Dr. Robert Lustig, professor of pediatric endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco.5 That percentage is even higher in adults older than forty-five. “In contrast to popular false beliefs, weight loss and health should not be a constant battle uphill through calorie restriction, which simply doesn’t work,” says Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt

Babycakes, I’m always crass and you love me for it.

Clara was human, so she didn’t understand why she liked Isaac so much.

Saucebox’s new bouncer smelled amazing – like warm brandy and lemon and nutmeg and freshly killed rabbit

security-meets-bodyguard-meets-private-muscles firm, called Heavy Lifting.

Gladdy was rumored to be in her nineties and Chrys was probably around sixty or

Omnivore Special. Tank recognized the color from when he’d had the tour. It was hot sake mixed with tuna water and wheat grass.

His boss was a slight, angular man, with a face both mean and beautiful, black limpid eyes inherited from his Filipino mother, and intricate full-sleeve tattoos that told stories of lost islands in a language Isaac wasn’t meant to comprehend. Xavier preferred his vodka cold and neat, his food fried, and his women leggy. He liked all three expensive and was protective of his passions

this shirt is a Coda & Zucchero!” Hayden did something important in finance downtown and liked to dress that way.

Saucebox had the general feel of an upmarket gallery, although more mellow lighting. White walls, big art, black dance floor that was a bitch to clean, and mirrors everywhere. No disco balls for Saucebox. Xavier didn’t do kitsch, or cheap, or corny. The lighting was recessed and subtle, except over the bar where the bottles glowed in backlit glory. And everything that needed lighting had it, especially the till, because money and alcohol were taken seriously.

Second only to the San Andreas Fault in size, the New Madrid Seismic Zone runs through the boot-heel north into the southern tip of Illinois and south into northeastern Arkansas for about 150 miles, which includes parts of the states of Missouri, Kentucky, Illinois, and Tennessee.

All We had to do was follow the damn train CJ

You are unaware that the bride is a geologist. When

Još samo nekoliko minuta. Toliko si je dopustila u svome bajkovitome svijetu obasutim zvijezdama i obojanim najljepšim mogućim bojama. Znala je da će ju stvarnost udariti čim otvori vrata, ali odjednom su se ona činila udaljena cijeli jedan životni vijek. Nažalost, njezina se bajka puno ranije približila kraju, jer su ubrzo stajali ispred vrata kuće. Prije nego su ih otvorili, ukrao joj je još jedan poljubac. Bio je obojan u najljepše nijanse i obavijen maglom koja joj se nadvila nad sjećanja. Bilo je poprilično kasno i bila je gotovo u polusnu, zbog čega joj je bilo teško razlikovati san i javu. A kada su im se usne odvojile, odlučili su se vratiti u realnost; samo što ona više nije zvučala toliko strašno.

Then you repeat. The thing that goes badly wrong means that the someone we like has to take another step to get around the bad wrongness and back toward the something he wants VERY BADLY. He takes the next step, and everything goes even more badly wrong. Then he loses his map. Then his flashlight falls into a storm drain and he has an asthma attack and his seeing eye dog dies. Then the cop who pulls him over for speeding while driving drunk in the nude turns out to be the short-tempered father of the bride he is marrying tomorrow. Then it goes more badly wrong for the someone we like, much more badly. Then the party is attacked and scattered by a band of goblins, and then the Gollum is on his trail, and the lure of the Ring is slowly destroying his mind. Then he finds the blasted corpses of his foster parents killed by Imperial Storm Troopers, and his house burnt to the ground. Then Lex Luthor chains a lump of Kryptonite around his neck and pushes him into a swimming pool and fires twin stealth atomic rockets at the San Andreas Fault in California and at Hackensack, New Jersey. And the spunky but beautiful girl reporter falls into a crack in the earth and dies. Then he is stung by Shelob and dies. Then he is maimed by Darth Vader and discovers his arch foe is his very own father, and he loses his grip and falls. Then he steps out unarmed to confront Lord Voldemort and dies. Then Judas Iscariot kisses him, Peter denounces him, he is humiliated, spat upon, whipped, betrayed by the crowd, tortured, sees his weeping mother, and dies a painful, horrible death and dies. Then he is thrown overboard and swallowed by a whale and dies. Then he gets help, gets better, arises from his swoon, is raised from the dead, the stone rolls back, the lucky shot hits the thermal exhaust port, and the Death Star blows up, the Dark Tower falls, the spunky but beautiful girl reporter is alive again due to a time paradox, and he is given all power under heaven and earth and either rides off into the sunset, or goes back to the bat-cave, or ascends into heaven, and we roll the credits.

The problem is, you’re looking for faults from the first moment you meet a man.” “I hate to disillusion you, but when they’re as obvious as the San Andreas, they’re not that hard to spot.

We, the weird and the sideways folk, have always walked the line of rejection. It’s what makes us visionaries. We who are pushed away, to the edge, can see beyond the borders of reality. We frighten the privileged with our possibilities.

On a smoggy spring day, the midday sun baked two California Highway Patrolmen in dark blue uniforms and a bearded dirt biker astride his Yamaha. They stood on a dirt road between the San Andreas barren earthquake faulted hills crisscrossed with biker’s trails. The sergeant stood next to the still body of Eduardo Sanchez, a thirteen-year-old boy clad in a t-shirt and oversized shorts, lying on his back with three bullet wounds and powder burns tattooed on his forehead. An astonished look captured his small immature cold face.

Ce livre n'aurait jamais existé si, durant les mois où je l'ai échafaudé, il n’y avait eu autour de moi trois personnes à qui je dois beaucoup. Je parle d'Alessandro Bandiera, d'Antonio Scalia et d'Andrea Bajani. Sans leurs mots, leur talent, sans leur amour viscéral pour tout ce qui concerne l'histoire, la poésie et la littérature, « Robledo » n'aurait jamais fait ses premiers pas. Quant à devenir un roman… selon toute probabilité, il serait resté comme une impression, l'ombre de qui sait quoi d'autre.

The greatest commemorations were in the United States, where from San Francisco to Philadelphia, and from Chicago to Charleston, the nation saw street parades, sumptuous dinners and concerts. In Cleveland some 8,000 people took to the streets and in Syracuse another 15,000 joined a march that was more than a mile long. President Ulysses Grant attended the Humboldt celebrations in Pittsburgh together with 10,000 revellers who brought the city to a standstill.

If Facebook’s fancy headquarters were to sink into the San Andreas Fault, the company might barely notice. If TSMC’s fabs were to slip into the Chelungpu Fault, whose movement caused Taiwan’s last big earthquake in 1999, the reverberations would shake the global economy.

On 14 September 1869, one hundred years after his birth, Alexander von Humboldt’s centennial was celebrated across the world. There were parties in Europe, Africa and Australia as well as the Americas. In Melbourne and Adelaide people came together to listen to speeches in honour of Humboldt, as did groups in Buenos Aires and Mexico City. There were festivities in Moscow where Humboldt was called the ‘Shakespeare of sciences’, and in Alexandria in Egypt where guests partied under a sky illuminated with fireworks. The greatest commemorations were in the United States, where from San Francisco to Philadelphia, and from Chicago to Charleston, the nation saw street parades, sumptuous dinners and concerts. In Cleveland some 8,000 people took to the streets and in Syracuse another 15,000 joined a march that was more than a mile long. President Ulysses Grant attended the Humboldt celebrations in Pittsburgh together with 10,000 revellers who brought the city to a standstill. In New York City the cobbled streets were lined with flags. City Hall was veiled in banners, and entire houses had vanished behind huge posters bearing Humboldt’s face. Even the ships sailing by, out on the Hudson River, were garlanded in colourful bunting. In the morning thousands of people followed ten music bands, marching from the Bowery and along Broadway to Central Park to honour a man ‘whose fame no nation can claim’ as the New York Times’s front page reported. By early afternoon, 25,000 onlookers had assembled in Central Park to listen to the speeches as a large bronze bust of Humboldt was unveiled. In the evening as darkness settled, a torchlight procession of 15,000 people set out along the streets, walking beneath colourful Chinese lanterns. Let us imagine him, one speaker said, ‘as standing on the Andes’ with his mind soaring above all. Every speech across the world emphasized that Humboldt had seen an ‘inner correlation’ between all aspects of nature. In Boston, Emerson told the city’s grandees that Humboldt was ‘one of those wonders of the world’. His fame, the Daily News in London reported, was ‘in some sort bound up with the universe itself’. In Germany there were festivities in Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, Frankfurt and many other cities. The greatest German celebrations were in Berlin, Humboldt’s hometown, where despite torrential rain 80,000 people assembled. The authorities had ordered offices and all government agencies to close for the day. As the rain poured down and gusts chilled the air, the speeches and singing nonetheless continued for hours.

Judd kissed him like it was the punctuation mark at the end of a sentence - a purposeful pause in time and breath. Contemplative and thorough. It had been a really good kiss.

And magic came in many forms.

A small, 4.8 quake, it was unlikely many other people in my town felt it. But alone in the house, I had shaken alongside the breaking earth, 1920s carnival glass looking on.

their fifteen minutes of fame. Alan Townsend? Maybe. During their interview, Orr had told Tracy she felt guilty about what had happened to Andrea while under her roof. Could helping Andrea to start a new life have been Orr’s way to cleanse herself of her own perceived sins? What did Tracy really know about Penny Orr? Nothing. She went back to her cubicle, hit the space bar on the keyboard, and brought her monitor to life. She logged on to the Internet, pulled up the website they used to conduct LexisNexis searches, and input information to run Penny Orr through the system. The search provided a history of the person’s past employers, former addresses, relatives, and prior criminal history. The history for Penny Orr was short. She’d moved twice, from the San Bernardino home address to a townhome, to the apartment complex. She’d had one sister, deceased. She had no prior criminal history. She’d had one employer. Tracy’s stomach fluttered. Penny Orr had spent thirty years working for the San Bernardino County Assessor. Sensing something, Tracy opened another Internet page and searched for the Assessor’s website. Pulling it up, she clicked her way through the pages until she came to a page announcing that, effective January 3, 2011, the offices of the County Assessor, County Recorder, and County Clerk had been consolidated. To the left of that announcement was a light-blue drop-down menu for the departments’ various services, including a link to obtain certified copies of a birth certificate. CHAPTER 31 T

- […] qualcuno [...] asserisce che la caduta di Sua Eccellenza non è stata accidentale, ma provocata dal fatto che il pianerottolo e i primi due gradini erano stati cosparsi d'olio […]. […] Secondo lei è stata la provvidenza che gli ha spaccato qualche osso, è vero, ma gli ha salvato la carriera? Ma via! E poco fa si è tradito, sa? Le sue parole di pietà verso Marascianno sono state meglio di una confessione! Ma non ha pensato che quel poveraccio poteva rompersi l'osso del collo? - Ci abbiamo pensato, signor Questore. - Come, 'ci'? - Io e la mia signora. E allora mia moglie si è premunita facendo una ricca offerta a San Calogero e spiegandogli che la cosa era a fin di bene. - Dice sul serio? -Noi ci crediamo, a San Calogero, signor Questore. E difatti, come vede...

It is impossible to take a step without walking through a ghost. Every memory creates one. Every version of ourselves leaves a shadow behind. Every regret and every promise and every touch against the skin. The living houses of San Francisco know this--arms gripping the hem of the San Andreas Fault, The death fields around Wounded Knee know this, where every blade of grass and weed briar is poison to the touch. The Tallahatchie River knows, gone bone dry the day Emmett Till was pulled from the waters, The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory knows, and Columbine High School knows, and Ford's Theatre knows-- with their leviathan eyes, their mouth that lick familiar air and sigh. The land, inch by inch, brick by brick, is alive with remembering.