"He came to United States twenty-eight years ago. He was very high-educated and also very nice person to the people...Then why, why he has to get shot? You know, I don't know why. So really angry, you know. Then I cry most of my life, this is the time I cry lot[...] (interview of Mrs. June Park whose husband was shot during the L.A. Riots; taken from Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight)".

"But already my bones have told me that I have come to the most detestable city on earth. They have carried me through the filthy air of a broken city filled with battered losers... Where I am, the buildings are crumbling to pieces. The paint is cracked and falling to the streets covered with green and brown phlegm, with eyeless souls who scuttle between tall buildings hoping to find a bed, a bottle, a joint, a broad or even a loaf of bread. Streets filled with dark people, hunchbacked hobos, bums out of work, garbage of yesterday and tomorrow, with black men and women in bright garish clothes, brown men with mustaches to boost themselves up a notch, coffee-drinking people, wine-sipping sods who haven't had more than five bucks at a time since the last war (Excerpt from ,  The Revolt of the Cockroach People , by Oscar Zeta Acosta, a Chicano rights activist)."

"Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they've been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies...The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing...the people who come to California to die; the cultists of all sorts, economic as well as religious, the wave, airplane, funeral and preview watchers...No longer bored, they sang and danced joyously in the red light of the flames (Excerpts from Nathaniel West's Day of the Locust)."

"Sometimes I feel like I don't have a partner, Sometimes I feel like my only friend, Is the city I live in, The City of Angels, Lonely as I am, Together we cry.   I drive on her streets 'cause she's my companion, I walk through her hills 'cause she knows who I am, She sees my good deeds and she kisses me windy, I never worry, Now that is a lie (excerpt from Red Hot Chili Peppers 'Under the Bridge')."