Cincinnati Reds Quotes

The Big Red Machine was exactly that - a freaking machine. ~ Tucker Elliot

After being maligned for his lack of offense for much of his career, [César] Gerónimo batted .280 with two home runs, a triple, three runs, and three RBIs vs. Boston during the 1975 World Series, and then he batted .308 with two doubles, two steals, and three runs vs. New York during the 1976 World Series. The man who's defense Sparky Anderson called 'ungodly' became an offensive star on baseball's biggest stage. ~ Tucker Elliot

Dave Concepción exceeded everyone's expectations - everyone's except, perhaps, his own. That's because as a kid, Concepción idolized Major League Hall of Fame shortstop and fellow-Venezuelan Luis Aparicio, and he aspired to become that same caliber of player. ~ Tucker Elliot

October 1976 was the penultimate performance of Bench's Hall of Fame career. All the early success and awards and accolades thrown in his direction had prepared him for this moment - when the Big Red Machine became a dynasty by defending it's World Championship from the season before. ~ Tucker Elliot

[George] Foster lacks the name recognition outside of Cincinnati that other members of the Big Red machine maintain, but that doesn't diminish his contributions to the club - he followed his MVP campaign with three more seasons of 20-plus home runs and 90-plus RBIs, never mind the fact he batted .326 during three trips to the World Series. And just like Rose and Morgan and Bench during their MVP seasons, Foster can say, if only for that one summer, he was the best in the game. ~ Tucker Elliot

My first interest in baseball is the welfare of baseball itself. My second is the Cincinnati Reds, and my third is Warren Giles. ~ Warren Giles

It's much easier to remember the World Series heroics of Tony Pérez, Pete Rose, and Joe Morgan than it is to recall who set the table for Rose during Game 7 of the 1975 World Series vs. Boston. The Red Sox led 3-2 in the seventh when [Ken] Griffey drew a free pass. Not nearly as memorable as the home run Pérez hit against Bill Lee that made it a 3-2 ballgame, not nearly as memorable as the hit Rose got to tie the game, and for sure not as memorable as the hit Morgan got to win it in the ninth, but … it's a shame people forget Griffey stole second base with two outs to get into scoring position. ~ Tucker Elliot

It took exactly one month of regular season play for fans to accept Sparky [Anderson] - posting a 16-6 record out of the gate has that kind of effect. ~ Tucker Elliot

Rose worked and played so hard that kids all across the country - not just in Cincinnati - were emulating him on sandlots everywhere, proud to dirty their jerseys doing a headfirst "Pete Rose" dive into cardboard boxes used for bases ... whether they needed to slide or not. ~ Tucker Elliot

It was one at bat during October 1975 that defined his [Joe Morgan's] place in baseball history and secured the legacy of the Big Red Machine, all with one swing. ~ Tucker Elliot

I think the Cincinnati Enquirer must be edited by children. ~ Mark Twain

Record sales don't really mean anything. For us, the pressure is imagining some 15-year-old kid in Cincinnati who buys our album and doesn't feel like he wasted his pocket money. ~ Chris Martin

Cincinnati at that time was also beginning to realize it had major cartooning talent in Jim Borgman, at the city's other paper, and I didn't benefit from the comparison.His footsteps seemed like good ones to follow, so I cultivated an interest in politics, and Borgman helped me a lot in learning how to construct an editorial cartoon. Neither of us dreamed I'd end up in the same town on the opposite paper. ~ Bill Watterson

Whenever socialism appears it destroys at least one thing: diversity. Everything has to be "the best", but in reality as we know best things are scarse.. Let me remind you again, that for the Reds, "best" things are these things that they consider "the best" for us, not these that we like!! ~ Janusz Korwin-Mikke

It was not a particularly sane spectacle, that impatience to be off to some place that lay not only in the distance, but also in the future - to which no line of road carries you with absolute certainty across an interval of time full of every imaginable chance and influence. It is easy enough to buy a ticket to Cincinnati, but it is somewhat harder to arrive there. Say that all goes well, is it exactly you who arrive? ~ William Dean Howells

The melting pot failed to function in one crucial area. Religions and nationalities, however different, generally learned to live together, even to grow together, in America. But color was something else. Reds were murdered like wild animals. Yellows were characterized as a peril and incarcerated en masse during World War ii for no really good reason by our most liberal president. Browns have been abused as the new slave labor on farms. The blacks, who did not come here willingly, are now, more than a century after emancipation by Lincoln, still suffering a host of slave like inequalities. ~ Theodore Hesburgh

There were people who said the Society of Cincinnati in the American revolution, of which George Washington was one of the shining lights, was a branch of the Illuminati. ~ Carroll Quigley

... Be there people either Conservatives or Socialists, Yellows or Reds, the most important thing is - and this is the point I wish particularly to stress - that all of them are right in the plain and moral sense of the word... I ask whether it is not possible to see in the present social conflict of the world an analogous struggle between two, three, five equally serious verities and equally generous idealisms? I think it is possible, and this is the most dramatic element in modern civilization, that a human truth is opposed to another truth no less human, ideal against ideal, positive words against words no less positive, instead of the struggle being, as we are so often told it is, one between noble truth and vile selfish error. ~ Karel Capek

Depression is hard to understand, because it is not a consistent state. Depression is rather like a virus, but like a virus, it has its manageable days and its acute, life-threatening flare-ups. You can be in a depression and still laugh at a friend's joke or have a good night at dinner or manage low-level functioning. You grocery shop and stop to pet a puppy on the corner, talk to friends in a café, maybe write something you don't hate. When this happens, you might examine your day for clues like reading tea leaves in a cup: Was it the egg for breakfast that made the difference? The three-mile run? You think, well, maybe this thing has moved on now. And you make no sudden moves for fear of attracting its abusive attention again.

But other times…

Other times, it's as if a hole is opening inside you, wider and wider, pressing against your lungs, pushing your internal organs into unnatural places, and you cannot draw a true breath. You are breaking inside, slowly, and everything that keeps you tethered to your life, all of your normal responses, is being sucked through the hole like an airlock emptying into space. These are the times Holly Golightly called the Mean Reds.

I call it White Knuckling it. ~ Libba Bray

Whereas land reform was the first act of the Bolsheviks, it was the last act of the Whites: that, in a peasant country, says it all. ~ Orlando Figes

If I had been busted for drugs instead of gambling, I'd still be managing the Reds and baseball would be paying for my rehab. ~ Pete Rose

But, Doc, I'm not fourteen any more, and I'm not Lulamae. But the terrible part is (and I realized it while we were standing there) I am. I'm still stealing turkey eggs and running through a brier patch. Only now I call it having the mean reds. ~ Truman Capote

Gritting my teeth as if it requires actual physical strength, I push the memory of him dying in my arms down, deep down. It almost seems to fight me, to want to surge into the forefront of my mind, and I sigh. Long ago I came to the realization that painful memories are persistent. The agony of them stays with you much longer, sharper, and clearer than sweet memories, that soften and assume a hazy, rosy glow in your mind, almost as if they have been airbrushed. Remembrance of pain is different; there is no muting of colors, no blurring of edges. No, its colors remain stark and bold, a palette of vibrant primary reds, blues, and yellows; its edges stay defined and razor sharp. Years later it can still cut you as deeply, make you bleed as profusely, as the day it was formed.
FROM AN UNTITLED WORK IN PROGRRESS ~ Lily Velden

Think reds, orange, yellows, greens, purple, blue - the darker and deeper the colors, the better they are for you. ~ Rick Warren

Mollycoddling was the mother's duty; the father's lay elsewhere. As a consequence, his four older children feared and respected him, as they had been taught to do, and the love the professed to feel, had they been asked and had they answered truthfully or even had access to the truth, was of a duty-bound, obligatory kind too, a love issuing from commandment and tradition and the notion of family, not one from the tides of the heart or the unbridled, inexplicable pull of feelings. If painted, that love would take the form of a polite and manicured wash of pleasant colours, not the hurl-and-splatter of impastoed reds. ~ Neel Mukherjee

By the time I joined the 'Washington Post' sports staff in 1979, Red's Runyonesque notion of sports writing was obsolete. ~ Jane Leavy

Wow!" My whole body exploded with joy and excitement to see this magnificent sight. Overwhelmed by their presence, my stomach fluttered right along with them. Butterflies of every color, looking as if they were painted with patches of bold bright reds, oranges, blues, purples, and yellows, all intertwined, overlapping each other. As I continued to follow their path, I squinted at the brilliant sun in the cloudless sky. It blinded me for a split second, and then I saw that the butterflies were returning, circling around Michael and me - all of them dancing in the sky. Each knew its location and position with such precision, never colliding while reaching higher and higher to form a tunnel. Countless butterflies, circling around us, gave me chills as I could feel the air gently flowing from their wings. It was incredible to experience such beauty of color and grace so close within reach. ~ C. Gockel

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
- the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly -
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
- It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his ~ Elizabeth Bishop

Come, get out of the way, boys
Quick, get out of the way
You'd better watch what you say, boys
Better watch what you say

We've rammed in your harbor and tied to your port
And our pistols are hungry and our tempers are short
So bring your daughters around to the port
'Cause we're the Cops of the World, boys

We're the Cops of the World
We pick and choose as please, boys
Pick and choose as please
You'd best get down on your knees, boys

Best get down on your knees
We're hairy and horny and ready to shack
We don't care if you're yellow or black
Just take off your clothes and lie down on your back

'Cause we're the Cops of the World, boys
We're the Cops of the World
Our boots are needing a shine, boys
Boots are needing a shine

But our Coca-cola is fine, boys
Coca-cola is fine
We've got to protect all our citizens fair
So we'll send a battalion for everyone there

And maybe we'll leave in a couple of years
'Cause we're the Cops of the World, boys
We're the Cops of the World
Dump the reds in a pile, boys

Dump the reds in a pile
You'd better wipe of that smile, boys
Better wipe off that smile
We'll spit through the streets of the cities we wreck

We'll find you a leader that you can't elect
Those treaties we sighned were a pain in the neck
'Cause we're the Cops of the Worl ~ Phil Ochs

If Titus raped a little girl who happened to be a Red, how would you feel?"

She doesn't know how to answer. The Law does. Nothing would happen. It isn't rape unless she wears the sigil of an elder House like Augustus. Even then, the crime is against her master.

"Now look around," I say quietly. "There are no Golds here. I'm a Red. You're a Red. We are all Reds till one of us gets enough power. Then we get rights. Then we make our own law." I lean back and raise my voice. "That is the point of all this. To make you terrified of a world where you do not rule. Security and justice aren't given. They are made by the strong."

"You should hope that is not true," Mustang says quietly to me.

"Why?"

"Because there is a boy here like you." Her face takes on a gloomy aspect, as though she regrets what she must say. "My Proctor calls him the Jackal. He is smarter and crueler and stronger than you, and he will win this game and make us his slaves if the rest of us go about acting like animals." Her eyes implore me. "So please, hurry up and evolve. ~ Pierce Brown

I was lookin' high an' low for them Reds everywhere, I was lookin' in the sink an' underneath the chair. I looked way up my chimney hole, I even looked deep inside my toilet bowl. ~ Bob Dylan

Roses are Reds, Violets are Blue, a simple sweet bouquet of flowers can brighten up anyone's day. ~ Regalo Manila

Jonn Deire picked up eight yellowed and dog-eared cards from the pile, grumbling 'garrn' under his breath, while chewing on a frazzled looking toothpick. Skooch threw down a five of reds and said nothing. There was an impatient pause as the players waited for Beck to remember he had to play for Peeping William, who was still grumbling softly and rolling his eyes at intervals. ~ Christina Engela

I want to see the Parthenon by moonlight.'

I had my way. They floodlight it now, to great advantage I am told, but it was not so then, and since it was late in the year there were few tourists. My companions were all intelligent men, including my own husband, and they had the sense to stay mute. I suppose, being a woman, I confuse beauty with sentiment, but, as I looked on the Parthenon for the first time in my life, I found myself crying. It had never happened to me before. Your sunset weepers I despise. It was not full moon, or anywhere near it. The half circle put me in mind of the labrys, the Cretan double axe, and the pillars were the most ghostly in consequence. What a shock for the modern aesthete, I thought when my crying was done, if he could see the ruddy glow of colour, the painted eyes, the garish lips, the orange-reds and blues that were there once, and Athene herself a giantess on her pedestal touched by the rising sun. Even in those distant times the exigencies of a state religion had brought their own traffic, the buying and selling of doves, of trinkets: to find himself, a man had to go to the woods, to the hills.

"Come on," said Stephen. "It's beautiful and stark, if you like, but so is St. Pancras station at 4 A.M. It depends on your association of ideas."

We crammed into Burns's small car, and went back to our hotel. ("The Chamois") ~ Daphne Du Maurier

Cora, the daughter of Isidore Levinson, a dry goods millionaire from Cincinnati, arrived in England in 1888, when she was 20 years old, with her mother as chaperone. By this time, even respectable rich American girls preferred to find their husbands amongst the nobility. Thanks to the successes of the earlier Buccaneers and a fashion for all things European, from interiors to dress designers such as the House of Worth, pursuing an English marriage had now become desirable. For these families, the many years in which Americans had fought to escape the clutches of colonial rule and create their own republic appeared to have been forgotten. ~ Jessica Fellowes

I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother's side of the family in general were interested in literature. ~ Kenneth Koch

The dude in red's back at the pole,
Up North where everything is cold.
But if he were right here tonight,
He'd say 'Merry Christmas! And to all, a good night!' ~ Kurtis Blow

The paintings that laughed at him merrily from the walls were like nothing he had ever seen or dreamed of. Gone were the flat, thin surfaces. Gone was the sentimental sobriety. Gone was the brown gravy in which Europe had been bathing its pictures for centuries. Here were pictures riotously mad with the sun. With light and air and throbbing vivacity. Paintings of ballet girls backstage, done in primitive reds, greens, and blues thrown next to each other irreverantly. He looked at the signature. Degas. ~ Irving Stone

Hurrah Boys! Let's get these last few reds then head on back to camp. Hurrah! ~ George Armstrong Custer

As rich as Cincinnati was in live music, New York was even more. ~ Gunther Schuller

Fall arrived with its honey light and cool evenings, and the maple leaves brightened to match the reds and yellow of ripe apples. It was time to put away the bounty of the warm months for fortitude during the cold ones, as humans had done for centuries. ~ Melissa Coleman

I grew up in Kentucky, so we do not have a pro team. My family was split between the Cubs and the Reds. I would say I go Cubs usually. That's sort of where I grew up. My older brother was a huge Reds fan. ~ Maggie Lawson

Starbucks has stores in America in many, many communities that are governed by many, many different municipalities. Starbucks cannot dictate to a municipality in Cincinnati or Kansas City or Sacramento how or why or when there should be a recycling program. ~ Howard Schultz

Through a large field that had turned a dead yellow after an early frost, past the multicoloured clapboard company houses and through a flurry of fabric hanging from clotheslines… after a few minutes he stopped at the edge of a high cliff, where a long time ago he'd been able to see the mine towers and orange smog from the steel mill way off in the distance, and he'd been able to stare for hours at the periwinkle-coloured ocean waves crashing against the jagged rocks below. At times he'd wonder what it would be like to cross the ocean. He knew from the books he'd read that he would be in Europe probably, that by plane it took hours, by boat it took weeks depending on the speed of the boat… he knew the street maps of Paris and London and Pennsylvania. He knew all the monumental buildings of the world… but he was unable to leave, if he tried to leave Nova Scotia, Mearth would lock him in the basement of his house for months, maybe even years, in the dark, isolated…
Not even wanting to consider it, he closed his eyes, the swift wind from the ocean gusting through the scraggly grass. As the sun briefly came out in a haze, a kaleidoscope of reds and golds, he lit a cigarette and tried to imagine that the mill and mines were still in their rightful place. ~ Rebecca McNutt