6 Quotes by Gary Kamiya

For cities are museums of time, and to live in them is to be haunted by the places they once were. The waterways that existed before the skyscrapers and freeways are a vanished world that beacons to us. When we catch glimpses of them, the city disappears. Its too-known streets dissolve into unfathomable terrain. It becomes innocent again. We want to unmake the city. To regain a lost paradise.

More than any city I know, San Francisco is made up of discrete neighborhoods, each with its own unique aura. The main reason for this is its terrain. Its convoluted landscape defines San Francisco's neighborhoods, endowing each of them with a specific terroir.

San Francisco, by contrast, is all about the collision between man and the universe. It is on auto-derive. Anarchic, blown-out, naked, it shuffles its own crazy deck. To walk the streets is to be constantly hurled into different worlds without event trying. As William Saroyan wrote, "The city has the temperament of a genius. It's unpredictable. Any street is liable to leap upwards at any time . . . It is a city with no rules. Like nature itself it improvises as it goes along.

As I walk her streets, the only thing that keeps me from stopping on every block and throwing my hands in the air in amazement are the old Jacob Marley chains we all clank around in, chains forged not so much by sin as by the weight of the weary world. But San Francisco, like the ghosts who visit Scrooge, always offers me another chance. In San Francisco, it is always Christmas morning.

Above all, San Francisco was alive. The painter John David Borthwick said of it, “People lived more there in a week than they would in a year in most other places.

In 1997, a killer whale killed a great white shark off the Farallones, the Super Bowl of species conflict on planet Earth.