Coastal Cities Quotes

I was born in New York. I grew up in San Francisco, Long Beach, and Los Angeles.

Saving Greenland is both a metaphor and a precondition for saving civilization. If its ice sheet melts, sea levels will rise 23 feet. Hundreds of coastal cities will be abandoned. The rice growing river deltas of Asia will be under water. There will be hundreds of millions of rising-sea refuges. The word that comes to mind is chaos. If we cannot mobilize to save the Greenland ice sheet; we probably cannot save civilization as we know it.

Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving: most of the scientists I spoke with assume we'll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade.

We're crazy about this city. First time we came here, we walked the streets all day, all over town and nobody hassled us. People smiled, friendly-like, and we knew we could live here. We'd like to keep our place in Greenwich Village and have an apartment here, God and the Immigration Service willing. Los Angeles? That's just a big parking lot where you buy a hamburger for the trip to San Francisco.

Rising sea levels will result in tens to hundreds of millions more people flooded each year with a warming of 3 or 4°C. There will be serious risks and increasing pressures for coastal protection in South East Asia (Bangladesh and Vietnam), small islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and large coastal cities, such as Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Calcutta, Karachi, Buenos Aires, St. Petersburg, New York, Miami and London.

I grew up in San Francisco and moved to L.A. about 20 years ago, and now my main home is in Hollywood.

I'm from New Orleans, but I lived in L.A. for a very long time.

This Time, Let's Build a New Venice and Not Another New Orleans

I kind of grew up on the East Coast, lived in New York for a while, then moved to L.A. So I'm not a New Yorker at all, but I'm much happier in New York; I've always liked it better.

It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest... The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance...

In my mind, I imagined L.A. to be skyscrapers on the beach. Of course, that's not what it actually looks like. And growing up watching 'Beverly Hills 90210' and 'Melrose Place,' I always had an obsession with L.A. and California in general.

Los Angeles is just New York lying down.

I've actually enjoyed my time in L.A. more than a New Yorker is supposed to.

The immense cities lie basking on the beaches of the continent like whales that have taken to the land.

You would think with me living in Los Angeles I would go to the beach all the time, but we don't. It's the same as visiting the Statue of Liberty. If you don't live in N.Y.C., it's the first stop on your family vacation, but if you live there, you only go if you have relatives visiting from out of town!

Miami's never been more than a spit from New York.

I love Santa Monica and Venice because I like the beach. I have a lot of friends in that area.

I like to think Portland and L.A. are not rivals; they're cousins. As cities on the West Coast, they're distinct in their own way but still culturally similar.

The reality of Katrina didn't really strike me until the first time I flew up in a helicopter and saw areas of the city that I had ridden my bicycle as a youth being fully flooded.

I love Baltimore, I miss the people, but I think L.A. is way more chill.

I grew up in Oregon, and then I lived in San Francisco and New York.

All this cut-price transcendentalism does not prevent California from being a startlingly physical state. This becomes most obvious where Los Angeles saunters down to the sea. The region is called Venice.

I love Los Angeles. I love Seattle, too, which is where we have our home. But the notion of spending a lot of time in Los Angeles has been exciting to me for years. The community down there is great.

San Francisco is a city; L.A. is a collection of suburbs that have very little in common with one another.