Oakland Quotes

Every station I was at, I never said goodbye - when I was in Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Oakland, and L.A. I don't know why. ~ Casey Kasem

Official boundaries are often hard to see. If you head north on Woodward Avenue, away from downtown Detroit, you wouldn't know exactly when you left the city and crossed over into Oakland County - except for a small sign that tells you. ~ Robert Reich

Delirium takes over Oakland Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle Right: Stephen Curry's wife, Ayesha, and limelight-grabbing daughter, Riley, wait for Game 6 to start at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland. ~ Anonymous

I got a job as a dishwasher in Oakland, and I would draw all day. It was nice because the lady who ran the boardinghouse where I worked let me live there for nothing if I gave her some drawings every week - mostly park drawings of birds and such. ~ Claes Oldenburg

toddler named Huey Newton was spirited from Monroe to Oakland with his sharecropper parents in 1943. His father had barely escaped a lynching in Louisiana for talking back to his white overseers. Huey Newton would become perhaps the most militant of the disillusioned offspring of the Great Migration. ~ Isabel Wilkerson

My job is to file things! I'm not going to be like, "Mr. Jacobsen from Oakland, California" - just listing his problems, like a rap. ~ Tamaryn

The future of desegregation was not just about reaching mere numerical diversity. It was about fostering radical diversity, the wild protean sort. It was about what might flower when people could really meet across the lines. The cover of the fifth volume of the Yardbird Reader, rendered in day-bright Oakland A's yellow and green, featured the collective caught as they laughed at someone's wisecrack. They looked simultaneously hip and welcoming. In this colorized vision of American renewal, everyone could share in the joy. ~ Jeff Chang

God, San Francisco was such a thief. A lady of the night, a sorceress with her hands out. Every time, all my years as a child, that we crossed the bridge, we had to pay to get in, pay to get out, pay for every little thing. Oakland was free, San Francisco was not. Pay me, pay me. Pay for the Pacific Ocean and the beach. I am expensive, the city always said, so pay me for my wonderful dark treats like the Steinhart Aquarium, with its dark wide hall lit up by tank after tank of bright gold green blue sharks dolphins whales stinger fish, cold-eyed still-as-a-corpse fish that didn't blink or budge when we tapped the thick glass with our fingernails. Pay, the voice said, to whomever took us on Saturday to the Fleischacker Zoo ... the hand of San Francisco reaches out to grab your stupid little nickels and dimes. Pay. Even as I stood in front of the Fat Lady, whose cackling gap-toothed twelve-feet-high, three-feet-wide body made me laugh for a solid hour, even as I collapsed in tears driven out of my eyes by laughter, I understood that the other name for San Francisco wasn't Frisco; it was pay you dumb jerks from Oakland pay. ~ Judy Juanita

Randy Moss is not a leader. He doesn't deserve to be the captain of the Oakland Raiders. He's the one who said he wanted to be traded. He's not happy. His effort is lacking. That's a disgrace to the uniform. I don't care what uniform you have on. ~ Boomer Esiason

In L.A., like, there's a lot of, like, materialism, and, you know, people who think they're better than each other because of the clothes they wear or how they dress, and in Oakland, it's not like that. ~ Kreayshawn

We would rather be feared than respected. ~ Al Davis

By not talking about death with our loved ones, not being clear through advanced directives, DNR (do not resuscitate) orders, and funeral plans, we are directly contributing to this future ... and a rather bleak present, at that. Rather than engage in larger societal discussions about dignified ways for the terminally ill to end their lives, we accept intolerable cases like that of Angelita, a widow in Oakland who covered her head with a plastic bag because the arthritic pain of her gnarled joints was too much to bear. Or that of Victor in Los Angeles, who hung himself from the rafters of his apartment after his third unsuccessful round of chemotherapy, leaving his son to discover his body. Or the countless bodies with decubitus ulcers, more painful for me to care for them even babies or suicides. When these bodies come into the funeral home, I can only offer my sympathy to their living relatives, and promise to work to ensure that more people are not robbed of a dignified death by a culture of silence. ~ Caitlin Doughty

It's been like that all spring. It's just that balls decided to hang up there. It's hard to catch it when you can't see it. But that's how it's going to be in Oakland in the afternoon anyway. ~ Nick Swisher

I saw greatness in John and he lived up to it. I also saw a tremendous competitor who loved to win. John is a standard bearer, someone that players, coaches, fans and the Raider Nation can all look up to. One of his great virtues, the fire that burned brightest in him, was his love and passion for football, which was seldom ever equaled. ~ Al Davis

Teaching in Providence and Oakland, I realized that the first thing is that it wasn't good enough to come in and assume that I had what my students needed in terms of knowledge and skills. I also had to show them that I was their ally. I had to show them that I was concerned about them, wanted to relate to them, and that I was fundamentally on their side. ~ Pedro Noguera

Getting us to cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step in our assimilation, absorption, erasure, the completion of a five-hundred-year-old genocidal campaign. But the city made us new, and we made it ours. We didn't get lost amid the sprawl of tall buildings, the stream of anonymous masses, the ceaseless din of traffic. We found one another, started up Indian Centers, brought out our families and powwows, our dances, our songs, our beadwork. We bought and rented homes, slept on the streets, under freeways; we went to school, joined the armed forces, populated Indian bars in the Fruitvale in Oakland and in the Mission in San Francisco. We lived in boxcar villages in Richmond. We made art and we made babies and we made way for our people to go back and forth between reservation and city. We did not move to cities to die. The sidewalks and streets, the concrete, absorbed our heaviness. The glass, metal, rubber, and wires, the speed, the hurtling masses - the city took us in. ~ Tommy Orange

When I came back I joined a black church in Oakland and that made me feel more at home, a bit like being connected to India. It felt funny to be around so many white people when I came back to the United States. It still bothers me. One of the things I liked living in Hawaii years later was the racial complexity of it. I remember that at the time when Sucheng and I got married--we met as graduate students at Berkeley and have been married almost forty years--one of the first houses we bought was in a Black neighborhood in west Berkeley and we didn't quite notice how uniformly Black it was until some weeks later. I said to Sucheng, "You know, we're the only white people in this neighborhood." And she looked at me and said: "Speak for yourself, honkie! ~ Mark Juergensmeyer

Oakland revolved around Forbes Field. Nothing in the city could match that atmosphere. ~ Willie Stargell

Fog spilled from the heights of San Francisco like the liquid it almost was. On better days it spread across the bay and took over Oakland street by street, a thing you saw coming, a change you watched happening to you, a season on the move. Where it encountered redwoods, the most local of rains fell. Where it found open space, its weightless pale passage seemed both endless and like the end of all things. It was a temporary sadness, the more beautiful for being sad, the more precious for being temporary. It was the slow song in minor that the rock-and-roll sun then chased away. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Sonny and another Hells Angel who was at the meeting thought they were beyond a little patch so they headed down to a local tattoo shop in Oakland and were the first to get the famous One Percent tattoos. ~ Chuck Zito

Safeco Field is a lot like a National League park. Because of that, we're more of a pitching-defensive type club. Anaheim and Oakland - and even Texas - are more offensive oriented. We're a club that doesn't blow anybody out, but at the same time we don't get blown out much. We're in most of the games. ~ Pat Gillick

If something is said about the Raiders, I'm ready to go to war. ~ Jim Otto

We have always had great and loyal fans in Oakland. ~ Jim Otto

I'm in pro football to win, to have the Raiders dominate, to have the Raiders global, and we're not going to be able to do that with a half-filled stadium. ~ Al Davis

Oh, my other goal was that I wanted to talk about this area and this time in history. I wanted to talk about growing up in Oakland, a white kid, from this kind of generation of broken homes and listening to hip-hop. ~ Moshe Kasher

Ter refused to ride buses. The people depressed him, sitting there. He liked Greyhound stations though. We used to go to the ones in San Francisco and Oakland. Mostly Oakland, on San Pablo Avenue. Once he told me he loved me because I was like San Pablo Avenue. He was like the Berkeley dump. I wish there was a bus to the dump. We went there when we got homesick for New Mexico. It is stark and windy and gulls soar like nighthawks in the desert. You can see the sky all around you and above you. Garbage trucks thunder through dust-billowing roads. Gray dinosaurs. ~ Lucia Berlin

What should the Oakland Police Department do next?'
Next? Moss thought. [...]
'Stop killing us.'
Then Moss walked away from it all. ~ Mark Oshiro

I'm a geek. I love SF and fantasy. I listen to metal. I follow the Oakland Raiders and the Orlando Magic. ~ John Joseph Adams

Port of Oakland truckers, who are not legally allowed to form a union, went on strike to protest against repressive work rules. The President of ILWU Local 10 helped the police break the picket line and directed his own members to cross, complaining without a hint of irony that the truckers were "trying to use the port as an economic tool. ~ Anonymous

Oakland kids are always the best. ~ Zendaya

The loony tuners are at it again. The cost of doing business in Oakland is already about the highest in the state. Compared with other cities, adoption of the proposed ~ Randy Hamilton

Occasionally I hear a band that blows me away. For instance, there's a musician in Oakland named Weasel Walter who has a band called the Flying Luttenbachers. Go see the Flying Luttenbachers when they're in your town. He's one of the greatest rock composers who ever lived, and he's struggling and living like a poverty-stricken hermit. ~ Glenn Branca

The fire that burns brightest in the Raiders organization is the will to win. ~ Al Davis

My mom started working at the California Shakespeare Theater in Oakland when I was two years old, so I've always grown up around theater. ~ Zendaya

The chip you carry has to do with being born and raised in Oakland. A concrete chip, a slab really, heavy on one side, the half side, the side not white. As for your mom's side, as for your whiteness, there's too much and not enough there to know what to do with. You're from a people who took and took and took and took. And from a people taken. You were both and neither. When you took baths, you'd stare at your brown arms against your white legs in the water and wonder what they were doing together on the same body, in the same bathtub. ~ Tommy Orange

Sometimes entire families participate unconsciously in a culture of self-dramatization. The kids fuel the tanks, the grown-ups arm the phasers, the whole starship lurches from one spine-tingling episode to another. And the crew knows how to keep it going. If the level of drama drops below a certain threshold, someone jumps in to amp it up. Dad gets drunk, Mom gets sick, Janie shows up for church with an Oakland Raiders tattoo. It's more fun than a movie. And it works: Nobody gets a damn thing done. Sometimes ~ Steven Pressfield

Wealthy queers support initiatives that lock up and murder poor queers, trans* people, and sex workers. Women in positions of power continue to defend and sometimes initiate the vicious assault on abortion and reproductive rights, and then off-load reproductive labor onto the shoulders of care workers, who are predominantly women of color whose employment is often directly tied to their citizenship status. The politics of "leaning in" for a small layer of wealthy women has dovetailed with budget cuts and health care rollbacks that have left poor women at the mercy of misogynist, increasingly lethal anti-reproductive-rights legislation, and left poor, queer and trans* people without access to necessary medical resources like hormones or AIDS medication.

Original pamphlet: Who is Oakland. April 2012.
Quoted in: Dangerous Allies. Taking Sides. ~ Tipu's Tiger

The Oakland A's, I loved all my teammates there. I loved all the coaches. They gave me the opportunity to play in the big leagues. And for that, I thank them. I mean it was a dream come true for me. ~ Tim Hudson

I grew up in Oakland and Berkeley, California. ~ G-Eazy

When I saw the sun bears at the Oakland Zoo, I immediately was drawn to them. Not to be ornery, but regarding what you said about the speaker identifying with the bear: I'm not sure it's exactly right to say that the speaker feels that the bear must share his sadness, or whatever else he is feeling. That would be classic pathetic fallacy, which is certainly generative for poetry, but here the speaker appears actually to be rejecting that idea. ~ Matthew Zapruder

Urban Indians feel at home walking in the shadow of a downtown building. We came to know the downtown Oakland skyline better than we did any sacred mountain range, the redwoods in the Oakland hills better than any other deep wild forest. ~ Tommy Orange

I was on a panel with light skinned Blacks and a famous gay science fiction writer, who were complaining about how Blacks are against gays and light skinned Blacks and how intolerant Blacks are of different groups. My position was that Blacks were among the most humanistic, tolerant groups in the country and that across the street from my house in Oakland was one inhabited by White gays. ~ Ishmael Reed

Oakland has now increased its payroll to the point that it now ranks third in the Bay Area among all McDonald's franchises. ~ Sandy Alderson

For several months they'd been drifting toward political involvement, but the picture was hazy and one of the most confusing elements was their geographical proximity to Berkeley, the citadel of West Coast radicalism. Berkeley is right next door to Oakland, with nothing between them but a line on the map and a few street signs, but in many ways they are as different as Manhattan and the Bronx. Berkeley is a college town and, like Manhattan, a magnet for intellectual transients. Oakland is a magnet for people who want hour-wage jobs and cheap housing, who can't afford to live in Berkeley, San Francisco or any of the middle-class Bay Area suburbs. [10] It is a noisy, ugly, mean-spirited place, with the sort of charm that Chicago had for Sandburg. It is also a natural environment for hoodlums, brawlers, teenage gangs and racial tensions.

The Hell's Angels' massive publicity -- coming hard on the heels of the widely publicized student rebellion in Berkeley -- was interpreted in liberal-radical-intellectual circles as the signal for a natural alliance. Beyond that, the Angels' aggressive, antisocial stance -- their alienation, as it were -- had a tremendous appeal for the more aesthetic Berkeley temperament. Students who could barely get up the nerve to sign a petition or to shoplift a candy bar were fascinated by tales of the Hell's Angels ripping up towns and taking whatever they wanted. Most important, the Angels had a reputation for defying police, for successfully ~ Hunter S. Thompson

What I loved the most about Oakland was that all of my neighbors came in as many colors, ideas, and religions as there are people on the planet. How lucky I was to know so many people that were so different and yet so much alike! ~ Patricia Polacco

I had no idea how much the stuff I was doing was affecting people outside Oakland. At the time, also, hip hop wasn't able to tour because all these clubs that let hip hop come in now, they would never have let hip hop come in. ~ Boots Riley

Mr. Fresh looked up. "The book says if we don't do our jobs everything could go dark, become like the Underworld. I don't know what the Underworld is like, Mr. Asher, but I've caught some of the road show from there a couple of times, and I'm not interested in finding out. How 'bout you?"
"Maybe it's Oakland," Charlie said.
"What's Oakland?"
"The Underworld."
"Oakland is not the Underworld!"
"The Tenderloin?" Charlie suggested. ~ Christopher Moore

When I was traded from the Oakland A's to the Atlanta Braves before the 2005 season, a childhood dream was realized. I grew up a Braves fan just a few hours south of Atlanta, and it was hard for me to believe that I was going to actually play for the Atlanta Braves and legendary manager Bobby Cox. ~ Tim Hudson

Being from Oakland, you see a lot of thing. You see friends turn on friends all the time. You see family turn on family. ~ Marshawn Lynch

I'm from Oakland and San Francisco, so I feel like the Pacific Northwest starts there and goes north - so, it's home to me. ~ Colin Trevorrow

Oakland is home, and you always want to go home. Anytime you get the chance, you're happy to go home. ~ Rickey Henderson

The murder rate in Chicago is skyrocketing, and you see who's doing it and perpetrating it - they all look like Chief Keef. When it comes to the point that, you know, that kids who are doing the killings, and they're kids 13 to 19 years old, and you can replicate that in New Orleans, you can replicate that in Oakland. All the kids look the same. ~ Lupe Fiasco

I majored in Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley and worked as a software developer for a couple of years. Then I taught high school computer science for over a decade and a half in Oakland, California. ~ Gene Luen Yang

In high school, I worked at The Video Room in Oakland, California. It had the largest selection of laser discs in the Bay Area. One guy owned all of them. ~ Colin Trevorrow

I think I just went into a system that was willing to utilize me and gave me opportunities and I felt fortunate to be able to go to Oakland and put the silver and black on. I wanted to prove to everybody that I could still play. ~ Jerry Rice

Living in Ohio, I grew up an Oakland Raiders fan. ~ Hugh Douglas

I started with the Oakland A's back in 1971 and there was press at every game and there were cameras on me when I was that young. So with 20 years being MC Hammer, I'm comfortable with cameras so when the camera goes on, I continue doing what I'm doing. ~ MC Hammer

No one could have brought in more personnel than we have to build a football team. ~ Al Davis

I love coffee, I love tea, I love the Java Jive, and it loves me. Coffee and tea and the Java and me, A cup, a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup. ~ Ben Oakland

During those long years in Oakland public schools, I did not have one teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or experience. Not one instructor ever awoke in me a desire to learn more or to question or to explore the worlds of literature, science, and history. All they did was try to rob me of the sense of my own uniqueness and worth, and in the process nearly killed my urge to inquire. ~ Huey Newton

California, Labor Day weekend...early, with ocean fog still in the streets, outlaw motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levis roll out from damp garages, all-night diners and cast-off one-night pads in Fricso, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur...The Menace is loose again, the Hell's Angels, the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles, jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the center stripe, missing by inches...like Genghis Khan on an iron horse, a monster steed with a fiery anus, flat out through the eye of a beer can and up your daughter's leg with no quarter asked and non given; show the squares some class, give em a whiff of those kicks they'll never know...Ah, these righteous dudes, they love to screw it on...Little Jesus, the Gimp, Chocolate George, Buzzard, Zorro, Hambone, Clean Cut, Tiny, Terry the Tramp, Frenchy, Mouldy Marvin, Mother Miles, Dirty Ed, Chuck the Duck, Fat Freddy, Filthy Phil, Charger Charley the Child Molester, Crazy Cross, Puff, Magoo, Animal and at least a hundred more...tense for the action, long hair in the wind, beards and bandanas flapping, earrings, armpits, chain whips, swastikas and stripped-down Harleys flashing chrome as traffic on 101 moves over, nervous, to let the formation pass like a burst of dirty thunder... ~ Hunter S. Thompson

As early as 1999, Major League Baseball Commissioner Allan H. ("Bud") Selig had taken to calling the Oakland A's success "an aberration," but that was less an explanation than an excuse not to grapple with the question: how'd they do it? What was their secret? ~ Michael Lewis

In Indiana we had a queen we named Alice which lived to the ripe old age of eight years and two months and did excellent work in her seventh year. There can be no doubt about the authenticity of this statement. We sold her to John Chapel of Oakland City, Indiana, and she was the only queen in his yard with wings clipped. This, however is a rare exception. At the time I was experimenting with artificial combs with wooden cells in which the queen laid. ~ Jay Smith

I recalled a theory my father had concocted one night, while we sat in an Oakland juke joint sharing a plate of ribs. He'd said humor, above all else, was what bound each of us and separated each of us from one another. Humor was the great moment of truth. What we thought was funny was how we defined ourselves, and revealed ourselves, whether we knew it or not. ~ Danzy Senna

In Oakland, Al Davis was a genius. We had Ron Wolff there, too, and he was a genius. There was no room for me to be a genius. ~ John Madden

Before playing football, I didn't fit in anywhere. My parents didn't have a lot of money, which they spent on our education to send us to Catholic private school in Oakland, mostly black. The other kids had more money than I did. I started school early; I was young. So I'd come back to my hood and read. ~ Ryan Coogler

I was born in San Francisco. I was raised in Oakland, so I'm, like, super Bay Area born, and, you know, it's just really multicultural up there, and there's a lot of subcultures just from, like, anything, like from rockabilly to, like, crazy punk scenes to, you know, a huge rap scene, and there's just all kinds of things you can do out there. ~ Kreayshawn

I remember facing him on opening day in 1987. It was Oakland at the Minnesota Twins, the first time I got him out on a breaking ball down-and-in and next at bat he hit the same pitch for a home run. I was telling my kids that story yesterday. ~ Curt Young

I live in Brooklyn, New York, and hail from the 'East Bay,' Oakland, CA. ~ Cary Fukunaga

Most dramatically, the Bridge served as an agonizing or exhilarating psychological symbol for the more than 1.2 million servicemen and women who sailed beneath it during World War II and for those soldiers and Marines who saw it from the air as their chartered World Airways or Flying Tiger plane took off from the Oakland Airport, banked westward across both bridges, and headed to Vietnam. Seen upon departure, whether from the channel or the air, the Golden Gate Bridge expressed the life left behind and the fearsome dangers to come. Seen upon return, the Bridge suggested safe harbor, recovery, the joy of life in years that now would be theirs. ~ Kevin Starr

I remember reading article about the woman in that Oakland neighborhood who lost all her children to violence. I wondered why'd she keep living there after the first one was killed. Didn't she care about the others?
Today, I zoomed out and wondered why I'm still in America. ~ Darnell Lamont Walker

In a nation still stuck in an old Jim Crow mind-set - which equates racism with white bigotry and views racial diversity as proof the problem has been solved- a racially diverse police department invites questions like: "How can you say the Oakland Police Department's drug raids are racist? There's a black police chief, and most of the officers involved in the drug raids are black." If the caste dimensions of mass incarceration were better understood and the limitations of cosmetic diversity were better appreciated, the existence of black police chiefs and black police officers would be no more encouraging today than the presence of black slave drivers and black plantation owners hundreds of years ago.

When meaningful change fails to materialize following the achievement of superficial diversity, those who remain locked out can become extremely discouraged and demoralized, resulting in cynicism and resignation. Perhaps more concerning, though, is the fact that inclusion of people of color in power structures, particularly at the top, can paralyze reform efforts. ~ Michelle Alexander

You have to ask what the end game is here - when 25 percent of Palo Alto homes are sold to overseas buyers as investments while the mainland Chinese property market tanks, when Palo Alto schools are known for their suicide rates as much as their academics, when the city that gave birth to the technology industry now can't even house startups because of its sky-high commercial rents, when Latino and black communities are being wiped from the Western side of the San Francisco Bay Area and Oakland out into the exurbs of the East only to be called back by smartphone to deliver laundry or drive people around. ~ Anonymous

I mean, I'm humble ... to me, I'm just a regular cat from Oakland, California. ~ Lance Gross

Do we expect minority officers, whose livelihood depends on the very departments charged with waging the war, to play the role of peacenik? That expectation seems unreasonable, yet the dilemma for racial justice advocates is a real one. The quiet complicity of minority officers in the War on Drugs serves to legitimate the system and insulate it from critique. In a nation still stuck in an old Jim Crow mindset - which equates racism with white bigotry and views racial diversity as proof the problem has been solved - a racially diverse police department invites questions like: 'How can you say the Oakland Police Department's drug raids are racist? There's a black police chief, and most of the officers involved in the drug raids are black.' If the caste dimensions of mass incarceration were better understood and the limitations of cosmetic diversity were better appreciated, the existence of black police chiefs and black officers would be no more encouraging today than the presence of black slave drivers and black plantation owners hundreds of years ago. ~ Michelle Alexander

I like playing for Oakland, they have a very colorful uniform. ~ Rickey Henderson

My emotions were like a crowd. Give 'em what they want. Barabbas or the J-man. There's gonna be a crucifixion. Well, more or less. Because if you ask me, purveyor of useless facts, the promise of sex with someone you're starting to like puts you smack dab in the centre of time, history, and the universe itself. Right there in West Oakland no less. The birth of a new religion, and all the madness that ensues. ~ Trebor Healey

I would definitely say the Oakland Raiders are the punk rock band of football. ~ Billie Joe Armstrong

Why can't DFW compete like San Francisco does with Oakland, like Miami does with Fort Lauderdale, and like Chicago O'Hare does with Midway? ~ John Ensign

My most prized possession was my library card from the Oakland Public Library. ~ Bill Russell