Circus Quotes - page 3

We renounce all your spectacles, as strongly as we renounce the matters originating them, which we know were conceived of superstition, when we give up the very things which are the basis of their representations. Among us nothing is ever said, or seen, or heard, which has anything in common with the madness of the circus, the immodesty of the theatre, the atrocities of the arena, the useless exercises of the wrestling-ground. (Tertullian)
When I was a kid I joined the circus. I did that. It is true. But it's not like you think. There was a guy, he had his own circus. His name was Carol Jacobs and he owned it. It was a small thing.
Christopher Walken
I believe you have to start with a craft; you don't just start with a dream. You've got to put a lot of work in. If you want to pursue acting, then you go to acting class. If you want to be a dancer, then you learn to dance, which is what I did. If you want to be a ventriloquist or join the circus ... When you're young, you start looking at what you want to do-not just who you want to be, but what you want to do. And I think the tenacity to say, "I'm going to perfect that,” is the beginning of a work ethic...
Goldie Hawn
I'm not gonna be in this room when that jury walks in. I'm not going through this and you knew that, your honor. You know how far you can push me..... You wanna make a circus? You got a circus. [points to prosecutor] I'll rain on your parade Jack. You'll see a thunderstorm. This will not be the pat little drama you've arranged.
Ted Bundy
But who looks for serious conduct at the public shows? A Cato never goes to the circus. Anything said there by the people as they celebrate should be deemed no injury. It is a place that protects excesses. Patient acceptance of their chatter is a proven glory of princes themselves.
Cassiodorus
The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus.
Marshall McLuhan
Tears and fears and feeling proud, To say "I love you" right out loud, Dreams and schemes and circus crowds, I've looked at life that way. But now old friends are acting strange They shake their heads, they say I've changed Well something's lost, but something's gained In living ev'ry day.
Joni Mitchell
I remember in the circus learning that the clown was the prince, the high prince. I always thought that the high prince was the lion or the magician, but the clown is the most important.
Roberto Benigni
I would have done well as a gypsy child, I think. A circus baby. I coulda played a great street urchin or ragamuffin. Or just been one. I certainly liked entertaining people and making jokes, but I don't know necessarily if that's what your child is prone to that you should necessarily put them in a real working industry at six years old.
Natasha Lyonne
You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he's really just hoping he makes it all the way across?
Jodi Picoult
Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood. (Erica Jong)
Ophelia was a circus queen the female cannonball projected through five flaming hoops to wild and shocked applause...
Natalie Merchant
John Cleese was with a group called Cambridge Circus, who had come to New York, and we became friends. Years later that produced a certain team effort.
Terry Gilliam
Word gets around when the circus comes to town, don't it?
Cormac McCarthy
I am beginning to feel like part of a travelling circus.
James Baldwin
You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town.
Anne Lamott
I think that my vampires in general were influenced by my being allowed to watch the Hammer vampire films. Vampire Circus, also shown as Circus of Fear, was one of those movies.
Laurell K. Hamilton
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids-and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination-indeed, everything and anything except me.
Ralph Ellison
So, ungentle reader, (as you and I value what we should ashamed-after witnessing a few minor circus-marvels-to call our "lives,") let us never be fooled into taking seriously that perfectly superficial distinction which is vulgarly drawn between the circus-show and "art" or "the arts." Let us not forget that every authentic "work of art" is in and of itself alive and that, however "the arts" may differ among themselves, their common function is the expression of that supreme alive-ness which is known as "beauty." This being so, our three ring circus is art-for to contend that the spectacle in question is not an authentic manifestation of "beauty" is as childish, as to dismiss the circus on the ground that it is "childish," is idiotic.
E. E. Cummings
The elephant has a thick skin, a head full of ivory, and as everyone who has seen a circus parade knows, proceeds best by grasping the tail of its predecessor.
Adlai Stevenson II
And Spaceship Earth, that glorious and bloody circus, continued its four-billion-year-long spiral orbit about the Sun; the engineering, I must admit, was so exquisite that none of the passengers felt any motion at all. Those on the dark side of the ship mostly slept and voyaged into worlds of freedom and fantasy; those on the light side moved about the tasks appointed for them by their rulers, or idled waiting for the next order from above. (Robert Anton Wilson)
Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.
E. B. White
I had an incident with a really dumb magazine called Voici where they printed a photograph of Lily-Rose, a long-lens shot from very far away, and I just went ballistic. You can sue them - I've sued a couple of times, Vanessa's sued and we win every time - but this time I was beyond suing. I just wanted to beat whoever was responsible into the earth - I just wanted to rip him apart.So I tracked him down and gave him a few suggestions about how to live life and stay healthy and he took my advice. Because that's just unacceptable. They can do anything they want to me - and most tabloids have - but not my kid, not my pure, innocent little baby. She didn't ask to be in this circus.
Johnny Depp
Nobody associated with Sahodarakal is really willing to disclose what camera wizardry it was that finally transformed Kamalahasan into a fascinating midget. Some of the dwarf scenes were shot in a circus playing in Cochin by digging a pit with the actor standing knee-deep in it. The shoes were fixed to his knee and the pit was covered with a carpet.
Kamal Haasan
A t that moment, a Colonel of Sanitation came striding by, in his green uniform. "You there!” he cried. "Ho, dragon, stop and patter for a bit. Quickly, quickly-haven't got all day! There are Mr. Goodbar wrappers in the streets still, after all my efforts, and the efforts of my men, day in day out-people, people, if we could just do something about the people, then perhaps an end to the endlessness. One could go home of a Friday night, and wipe the brow, and doff the uniform, and thank God for a day well squandered. But you-you have a strange aspect. What kind of a thing are you? Are you disposable? Biodegradable? Ordinary citizen out for a stroll? Looking for work? Member of a conspiracy? Vegetable? Mineral? Two-valued? Hostile to the national interest of the Department of Sanitation? Thrill-crazed kid? Objet d'art? Circus in town?”.
Donald Barthelme