Top 100 A Circus Quotes
#1. I started out doing multiple characters from day one, when I got my fist job in 'Dumbo's Circus.' I'm used to getting in an argument with myself, throwing myself off a cliff, patching myself up and brushing myself off with an arm around my shoulder.
Jim Cummings
#2. What's this?" he inquired, none too pleasantly. "A circus?"
"No, Julius. It's the end of the circus."
"I see. And these are the clowns?"
Foaly's head poked through the doorway.
"Pardon me for interrupting your extended circus metaphor, but what the hell is that?
Eoin Colfer
#3. It's weird: making a movie is like life compacted into three months. You have these very intense relationships with people, and you talk to them every day - your editor, the casting people, music people, your actors - then it ends. It's like a circus life.
Dito Montiel
#4. It almost contradicts itself," she says after a moment. "It's as if there is love and loss at the same time, together in a kind of beautiful pain.
Eric Morgenstern
#5. Unless you have a life of great importance, regrets are stupid, crumpled-up tickets to a circus that has already left town.
Lorrie Moore
#6. This isn't a religious book though I mention God, not a medical advisory though I speak of pain. It's a circus, a mortuary, a grade school, a limousine ride. Will it be worth the paper it's printed on or the screen you hold in your hand? I just hope you remember it next week.
Chila Woychik
#7. Nobody should try to play comedy unless they have a circus going on inside.
Ernst Lubitsch
#8. Tradition can not justify such misery. Surely people can enjoy themselves at a non-animal circus with exciting human acts instead?
Claire McClennan
#9. The circus collects the outsiders like a flame tempts moths.
Laura Lam
#10. This is a really good circus. It has lions, tigers, dogs, monkeys and about any other animal act you can think of. There are a lot of great acts, and it's a two part, two hour show.
Howard Thompson
#11. The circus looks abandoned and empty. But you think perhaps you can smell caramel wafting through the evening breeze, beneath the crisp scent of the autumn leaves. A subtle sweetness at the edges of the cold.
Erin Morgenstern
#12. Every once in awhile you find a novel so magical that there is no escaping its spell. The Night Circus is one of these rarities - engrossing, beautifully written and utterly enchanting. If you choose to read just one novel this year, this is it
Danielle Trussoni
#13. I'm never going to be the lead actor guy. I'm real quiet and real happy and real fortunate to keep working. It's what I do. It's like the circus. I ran away and joined it a long time ago.
Michael Ironside
#14. In a world full of lions and tigers entertaining the masses, have you ever seen a wolf performing in a circus?
Akilnathan Logeswaran
#15. When I was a kid, I worked in the circus. It was a touring circus that was owned by a man named Terrell Jacobs. It was just one big tent, and he was a lion tamer. He didn't have any kids, but the bit was that I would dress up as his son in an identical outfit.
Christopher Walken
#16. That's bad luck: three on a midget. From At The Circus
Groucho Marx
#17. Going back to Georgiana Drew and John Drew, and my great-grandfather Maurice Barrymore, and it was such a sort of circus of odd, interesting people that loved acting.
Drew Barrymore
#18. If you surround yourself with clowns, don't be surprised when your life resembles a circus.
Steve Maraboli
#19. Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.
E.B. White
#20. Prediction is the best circus act of all. But it is just an act. It's a carny turn. Stop doing it.
Warren Ellis
#22. It is a matter of perspective, between opponent and partner ... You step to the side and the same person can be either or both or something else entirely.
Erin Morgenstern
#23. Life is a circus ring, with some moments more spectacular than others.
Janusz Korczak
#24. Just a few more years and then we'll join the circus.
Ray S. Jones
#25. Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author's equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus.
George Bernard Shaw
#26. We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.
Charles Bukowski
#27. As a child I went to a circus. They had a man shot out of a cannon into a net. I became intrigued with what was going on.
Wally Schirra
#28. For better or worse, I have a lot of vaudeville circus skills that you just can't showcase in Aaron Sorkin's work.
Joshua Malina
#29. I don't want to end up being a circus act, doing my most famous tricks when I'm 70.
Pharrell Williams
#30. The tarps Ken Weinrich's crew used has yellow and royal blue stripes, not unlike those for a circus, and this had lent a festive yet undignified mood to the proceedings.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#31. Funerals and weddings were commonplace, and nothing could have been so interesting to them as the coming of the end of the world ... unless it had been a first-class circus.
Edward Eggleston
#32. Being an actor is well paid, but it's a bit like being a circus traveler.
Ben Chaplin
#33. I don't have a place that I call home at the moment because there's no point. I mean, I'm a traveling circus for a while. It's weird. Like, if I wanted to go home, there's nowhere to go. I just go to a hotel. But I've kind of gotten used to it.
Idris Elba
#34. Why did he warn me about a circus? Isn't it supposed to be a fun place? Unless you meet the clown, of course.
Cameron Jace
#35. I want to be a traveling circus in that big-league uniform, like everybody else.
Dontrelle Willis
#36. It's a sign of this film's greatness that the enormous sadness that accompanies the final leave-taking of the circus interior is a good deal more than the conclusion of an unpretentious evening's entertainments; it's a sublime and awesome coda to the career of one of this century's greatest artists.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
#37. And over the following months some of the articles are reprinted in other German papers, and eventually they are translated and printed in Sweden and Denmark and France. One article finds its way into a London paper, printed under the title "Nights at the Circus." It
Erin Morgenstern
#38. I went camping and borrowed a circus tent by mistake. I didn't notice until I got it set up. People complained because they couldn't see the lake.
Steven Wright
#39. God help us! We have turned the holy fire of God into a circus sideshow - and naive Christians are buying this without realizing that such shenanigans are actually blasphemous.21
John F. MacArthur Jr.
#40. The bit I love is I really love acting, really, and the circus of being a celebrity is something I'm sort of not interested in. I find it strange
Tom Hiddleston
#41. Marriage is a good deal like a circus: there is not as much in it as is represented in the advertising.
E.W. Howe
#42. I could spend my whole life photographing circuses. They combine everything I'm interested in - they're ironic, poetic, and corny at the same time. There's also something about a circus that's magical, sentimental, and almost tragic, like a Fellini film.
Mary Ellen Mark
#43. A company commander,' said Dicky Umfraville, when we met later that year, 'needs the qualifications of a ringmaster in a first-class circus, and a nanny in a large family.
Anthony Powell
#44. When you were a kid and the circus came to town it was awesome to see these little creatures, but these things go out of fashion, like polyester blazers with rolled up sleeves. We don't have to suffer them anymore so why are there all these little people running around?
Zach Braff
#45. Maybe there's just sexuality, and it's bendable and unpredictable, like a circus performer ( ... )
David Levithan
#46. I enjoy being a hyphenate. I've always thought of my career as a plate spinner in the circus.
Neil Patrick Harris
#47. Pulling his attention away from the bottom lip he still found fascinating, Oliver felt his lips twitch. "You really were in a circus?"
"With everything I've just disclosed to you, you're most interested in the idea I was once in a circus?
Jen Turano
#48. Blind with love, my daughter
has cried nightly for horses,
those long-necked marchers and churners
that she has mastered, any and all,
reigning them in like a circus hand ...
Anne Sexton
#49. If I wanted a circus ringmaster, I'd hire Trump. If I wanted advice on brain surgery or hospital management, I'd turn to Carson. Fiorina would make an articulate television pundit. But for president?
Nicholas Kristof
#50. Damn everything but the circus! ... The average 'painter' 'sculptor' 'poet' 'composer' 'playwright' is a person who cannot leap through a hoop from the back of a galloping horse, make people laugh with a clown's mouth, orchestrate twenty lions.
E. E. Cummings
#51. There are a lot of reasons why everyone in the known universe has a boyfriend except for me. I can list the top five on command, just in case anyone's ever interested. No one ever has been, but that's no reason not to be prepared.
J.J. Howard
#52. Where are they going to get a camera? I asked. I don't know, said Noehmi. They'll probably get sidetracked along the way. Or they'll come back with paint instead, or beer, or some new idea for a circus or something. They're social anarchists.
Miriam Toews
#53. I was one in a million. I wasn't bright enough to realize the circus fat lady is, too
Stephen King
#54. I was a teenage boy once too, you know," Uncle Mort said, popping back up. "I know what your brain looks like. It's a three-ring circus in there.
Gina Damico
#55. Souls dance undressed/ together/ and like loiterers/ on the fringes of a fair/ we ogle the unobtainable/ imagined mystery/ Yet away around on the far side/ like a stage door of a circus tent/ is a wide vent in the battlements/ where even elephants/ waltz thru
pg. 31// A Coney Island of the Mind
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#56. Poets and painters are outside the class system, or rather they constitute a special class of their own, like the circus people and the Gypsies.
Gerald Brenan
#57. My class is not a three ring circus.
Hetty King
#58. Pittsburgh felt like the perfect size of a city to me. There's enough to do, but it's not like living in a circus. I also really loved how sports-enthusiastic Pittsburgh people are: how proud of their sports they are.
Joel Edgerton
#59. I'm a street photographer, but I'm interested in any ironic, whimsical images, and there's something very romantic about a circus.
Mary Ellen Mark
#61. watch William's beloved sport, but to him televised football was no more interesting, or even narratively intelligible, than a flea circus, so he got up and went to the kitchenette to do the other stations of the Yuletide cross.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#62. People would be in hysterics if they saw that. It's like, wow, he's a superhuman moron ... So he wears lipstick, has a little bouffant, and does little circus acts as well. Oh, he's so sexy.
Robert Pattinson
#63. Love has been described as a three-ring circus: First comes the engagement ring, then the wedding ring, and after that the suffering.
Bob Phillips
#64. I never went to acting school. I started in the circus, music hall, I was in a group, did kids' bits. I've always had this kind of insecurity being uneducated.
Rupert Graves
#65. Ah Ratty, what good times we'll have," said Mad Jack. "Just you and me, Ratty. We'll go cuttin' them reeds together, and if you're good we'll go to the circus when it comes to town and see the clowns. I love them clowns, Ratty. We'll have a good life together. Yes we will. Oh yes.
Angie Sage
#66. Matilda said nothing. She simply sat there admiring the wonderful effect of her own handiwork. Mr Wormwood's fine crop of black hair was now a dirty silver, the colour this time of a tightrope-walker's tights that had not been washed for the entire circus season.
Roald Dahl
#67. Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.
Ben Hecht
#68. Life is a circus: you go in, bow, run around, bow again and leave.
Storm Petersen
#69. My people. I have given them a sense of individuality, integrity. I have not made them slaves of any god or any religion. Nor of any holy book or any priest. I have certainly not replaced their god. They are all a part of what I call my traveling circus.
Rajneesh
#70. Circuses are about entertainment and juggling and animals and all that shit. Sideshows are about freaks, about people and the limits of acceptability. We push those limits. If a circus is an escape, Fire said, a sideshow is a confrontation.
Chris Abani
#71. You just can't imagine the kind of guy he was without seeing him play. He was a circus, a play, a movie, all rolled into one.
Lefty Gomez
#72. I knew that, and still it surprised me. How long I was willing to wait for something that was only a possibility.
Erin Morgenstern
#73. But the soul of touring and the heart of it is basically every day is like putting up a circus tent.
Pat Benatar
#74. My father used to describe how he'd love going, early in the morning, out on a location and waiting for the trucks to arrive and the circus to come to town. That's what it's like, every day, when you're making a film. It's the magic.
Barbara Broccoli
#75. The right to lead a life free of fear is a fundamental right of all living beings. But this fundamental right is being brutally violated by humans in animal testing, meat and dairy industry, circus, zoos, aquariums, and sports.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
#76. Life has been reduced to a series of long periods of boredom in the office punctuated by high-octane "experiences" which you can rack up on your list of things to do before you die. That's not really living: that is slavery with the occasional circus thrown in.
Tom Hodgkinson
#77. I look like a casual, laid-back guy, but it's like a circus in my head.
Steven Wright
#78. What do we lose without wild animal acts at the circus? Absolutely nothing, except the opportunity to be haunted and heartbroken.
K.A. Applegate
#79. He looks funny in a suit jacket, like a bear dressed up in costume for the circus. I would never tell him that, though.
Lauren Oliver
#80. I have been treated as a freak, rather like the fat lady at the circus.
Margaret Hughes
#81. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a clown. I didn't want to be an actor, I wanted to join the circus and entertain people.
Eric Stonestreet
#82. But for the use of physical punishment by, and fear of their oppressors, animals would never be a part of a circus.
Richard Pryor
#83. I'm the first has-been star singer ever to sing with the circus. I mean, Presley sang with the circus, but that was before he became a star.
Tiny Tim
#84. 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
#85. Technique is not being able to juggle a ball 1000 times. Anyone can do that by practicing. Then you can work in the circus. Technique is passing the ball with one touch, with the right speed, at the right foot of your team mate.
Johan Cruijff
#86. And finally, in our time a beard is the one thing that a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in a circus.
John Steinbeck
#87. You turn into this desperate dude looking for a shred of attention when you just had so much. It's like, "I'm just lonely and all I really want is a hug, but I gotta capture that in something real gross." You start to understand why circus clowns are alcoholics.
Babatunde Adebimpe
#88. Writing is for men who can think and feel, not mindless sensation seekers out of nightclubs and bars. But these are bad times. We are condemned to work with upstarts, clowns who no doubt got their training in a circus and then turned to journalism as the appropriate place to display their tricks.
Naguib Mahfouz
#89. When I first started dating my husband, I had this weird fascination with the circus and clowns and old carnival things and sideshow freaks and all that. About a month after we started dating, he bought me this amazing black-and-white photo book on the circus in the 1930s, and I started sobbing.
Christina Hendricks
#90. Marriage is a three ring circus: engagement ring, wedding ring and suffering. ~ Unknown
Melinda Curtis
#91. Where are we going now?" Harry asked. "To the circus! I promised a friend I would pop by one day. And today is one day, isn't it.
Jo Nesbo
#92. The circus a place where horses, ponies and elephants are permitted to see men, women and children acting the fool.
Ambrose Bierce
#93. It seems so absurd to get really mad with a cartoonist over a comic strip. It's sort of like getting in a fight with a circus clown outside your house. It's not going to end well.
Stephan Pastis
#94. I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall.
Annie Dillard
#95. The world is fantastic...it's the ultimate absurd circus and I am shot from a cannon into the energy!
Michael Fitzsimmons
#96. In a way, all actors are gypsies, or much like a traveling circus.
Danny Huston
#97. I love animals, and I was always attracted to the idea of being a zoo veterinarian or a veterinarian with the circus.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#98. Stand still for a moment and whole world looks like a grand circus.
Saurabh Sharma
#99. Next to a circus there ain't nothing that packs up and tears out any quicker than the Christmas spirit.
Kin Hubbard
#100. Toys to deftly pluck up like animal crackers and deposit safely into a crate decorated with friezes of bright circus trains carrying aardvarks, dodos, swift dromedaries, baby elephants, and plastic dinosaurs. A box of mixed metaphors.
Patti Smith
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