9 Quotes That Tap The LoveHate Mythology Of LA

While the reputation of Los Angeles as ‘the city that dreams are made of’ continues to attract those seeking fame and fortune, the city has a dark shadow that is equally revered. From Kerouac to Didion, many authors have cast Los Angeles as a complicated and sordid urban muse, finding motifs in its notorious flaws: the smog as human folly; the plastic denizens as superficiality; the rising heat as inevitable apocalypse; the sprawling concrete as impenetrable loneliness. These nine quotes illustrate a brand of self-loathing that permeates the native mythology. In part, to love Los Angeles is to love to hate it too.
‘The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun. And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to the others; Smith and Jones and Parker, druggist, banker, baker, dust of Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland on their shoes, doomed to die in the sun, a few dollars in the bank, enough to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, enough to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mâché homes were castles.’
–John Fante, Ask The Dust

‘I come to a red light, tempted to go through it, then stop once I see a billboard sign that I don’t remember seeing and I look up at it. All it says is ‘Disappear Here’ and even though it’s probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a little and I step on the gas really hard and the car screeches as I leave the light.’
–Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

‘An afternoon drive from Los Angeles will take you up into the high mountains, where eagles circle above the forests and the cold blue lakes, or out over the Mojave Desert, with its weird vegetation and immense vistas. Not very far away are Death Valley, and Yosemite, and Sequoia Forest with its giant trees which were growing long before the Parthenon was built; they are the oldest living things in the world. One should visit such places often, and be conscious, in the midst of the city, of their surrounding presence. For this is the real nature of California and the secret of its fascination; this untamed, undomesticated, aloof, prehistoric landscape which relentlessly reminds the traveller of his human condition and the circumstances of his tenure upon the earth.’
–Christopher Isherwood, Exhumations
‘I could hear everything, together with the hum of my hotel neon. I never felt sadder in my life. LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets god-awful cold in the winter but there’s a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.’
–Jack Kerouac, On The Road

Joan Didion, Slouching towards Bethlehem

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