The Circus Quotes

#1. 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

#2. The circus collects the outsiders like a flame tempts moths.

Laura Lam

#3. The circus is the perfect business right now because parents want their kids to be kids and not Charley Bucket drinking cabbage soup all day.

Jonathan Dunne

#4. 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

#5. In a world full of lions and tigers entertaining the masses, have you ever seen a wolf performing in a circus?

Akilnathan Logeswaran

#6. 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

#7. That's bad luck: three on a midget. From At The Circus

Groucho Marx

#8. Just a few more years and then we'll join the circus.

Ray S. Jones

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. Hell - you'll be lucky to join the circus!"
"I don't need to join the circus." Ethan stretches his arms to the sky, bored with the entire situation. "I live with you, don't I?"
"He so got Tad there," I whisper.

Addison Moore

#13. I enjoy being a hyphenate. I've always thought of my career as a plate spinner in the circus.

Neil Patrick Harris

#14. What, no balloons?' Billi asked drily.
'You want balloons, join the circus.

Sarwat Chadda

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. When you're in theater or the circus or film - to me it's all one - affairs happen. People fall in love.

Baz Luhrmann

#21. What do we lose without wild animal acts at the circus? Absolutely nothing, except the opportunity to be haunted and heartbroken.

K.A. Applegate

#22. 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

#23. I never doubted my talent. If talent was the circus, then I was its ringmaster and audience, applauding its every move.

Philip Schultz

#24. If you can't ride two horses at once, you shouldn't be in the circus.

James Maxton

#25. The circus a place where horses, ponies and elephants are permitted to see men, women and children acting the fool.

Ambrose Bierce

#26. 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

#27. A book reviewer is usually a barker before the door of a publisher's circus.

Austin O'Malley

#28. I wanted you to have a place where you felt safe enough to cry if I could not be with you.

Erin Morgenstern

#29. Well, I had an immense respect for Cirque du Soleil when I first say them in the '80s on a television show and just thought, you know, this group is really reinventing the circus, as you know. Because there wasn't three rings. There were no animals.

Criss Angel

#30. The days are usually filled with nonsense and every now and again somebody flies by the circus to party on your dime.

Ian Astbury

#31. We took up the offer with the BBC, and that was Monty Python's Flying Circus. I didn't have to submit my ideas to the group. I used to turn up on the days we recorded with a can of film under my arm, and in it went.

Terry Gilliam

#32. The second officer had turned fully to look down at Vincent's saws. "Those are for dissecting dwarves and children," The Saw Man said, gravely.

Jackie Trippier Holt

#33. Oh, I used to lie all the time as a kid. I didn't think of it as lying, though. I thought of it as playing make-believe. I told Kitty she was adopted and her real family was in a traveling circus. It's why she took up gymnastics.

Jenny Han

#34. Three things are forever consistent: the passing of time, the rotation of the Earth, and the ringmaster of Vagabond Circus.

Sarah Noffke

#35. I was driving pretty much the way everyone drives in LA, like elephants dancing on each others' backs at a circus.

Gary Reilly

#36. I have no complaints about my path and the places it has taken me; enough complaints to fill a circus tent about other things, maybe, but the path I've chosen has always been the right one, and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

Nicholas Sparks

#37. All the world's a circus. Sometimes you choose your act and sometimes it's assigned to you.

Mia Sheridan

#38. To the dump kids, it also seemed perfectly logical that they were driven to the circus by a transvestite prostitute.

John Irving

#39. That makes entertaining television. That is the circus of American Idol . We go for the very, very best and the very, very worst. It's the boring people that we don't want to see on television.

Nigel Lythgoe

#40. We had fancied our task would be different, only to find we were to be trained for heroism as though we were circus-ponies. But we soon accustomed ourselves to it. We learned in fact that some of these things were necessary, but the rest merely show. Soldiers have a fine nose for such distinctions.

Erich Maria Remarque

#41. Every time the circus comes to town, I can't help thinking, Somewhere out there, there's clown semen.

Dana Gould

#42. I treat him [Donald Trump] as an entertainer. I laugh it off. It's like going to the circus and seeing the acrobats and the dancing bears. He's willing to say things that are patently false.

Ted Cruz

#43. The circus itself is my personal ideal entertainment venue.

Erin Morgenstern

#44. You love the way it makes me feel when I can't catch my breath Like walkin' on a high wire, Lord, it scares me half to death You're always high above me and I'm always fallin' down Our loves just a circus baby, and I'm just the clown

Conway Twitty

#45. At least a circus performance does not last long, and the regime availing itself of the services of clownish journalists has the longevity of a mouldering mushroom.

Anna Politkovskaya

#46. All in all, it was the goldarndest, Barnum-and-Baileyest, rib-stickinest, rough-and-tumblest infernal foofaraw of a media circus anybody had seen since grandpaw chased the possum down the road and lost his store teeth, and I was heartily sorry to have been a part of it.

John Varley

#47. Basically, if you put a fence around New York City, you'd have the world's biggest nontraveling circus.

James Patterson

#48. The Them hesitated. Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants. They left.

Terry Pratchett

#49. When I retired from the circus at the grand old age of 11, my parents thought it would be best to focus more on the challenges ahead, and so I started at Methodist College Belfast.

Ian Beattie

#50. That it's possible to be against the circus, not because you're afraid to die there, but because it's wicked and wrong.
~Aurelia, 152

Lynne Reid Banks

#51. When someone makes a Family Circus reference and everyone on the room laughs, I'm in the wrong room.

Josh Hanagarne

#52. I'm very influenced by the circus. A lot of the dreams that I have, I'm in the circus.

Jeff Mangum

#53. I fell asleep in an empty field, but woke up at the circus.

J.J. Howard

#54. I welcome newcomers to cons, or 'con-virgins' as I like to call them, by saying 'Welcome to the 'Supernatural' Circus,' and I mean it. We take pride as a cast to deliver a show that not only entertains the fans but ourselves, Creation Entertainment, and everyone involved on both sides.

Matt Cohen

#55. I write because I want more than one life; I insist on a wider selection. It's greed, plain and simple. When my characters join the circus, I'm joining the circus. Although I'm happily married, I spent a great deal of time mentally living with incompatible husbands.

Anne Tyler

#56. I felt as if I'd been spun around fifty times then released into the middle of a circus and told to have fun.

Rick Riordan

#57. The money I pay for my cultural experiences came willingly from my own pocket - they were not the result of bread being removed from the mouths of the poor so that Miss Thing here could mince off to the circus smelling of roses.

Julie Burchill

#58. This is not magic. This is the way the world is, only very few people take the time to stop and note it.

Erin Morgenstern

#59. If you were to ask me, 'What the hell does a musician have in common with a restaurant?' I would say a huge amount. It's show time every day, it's a team of people, like, running a circus, which is running a rock-and-roll band.

Mick Fleetwood

#60. See this abdicated beast, once king
Of them all, nibble his claws:
Not anger enough left - no, nor despair -
To break his teeth on the bars.

Cecil Day-Lewis

#61. The Englishman walks before the law like a trained horse in the circus. He has the sense of legality in his bones, in his muscles.

Maxim Gorky

#62. Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn't mean the circus has left town.

George Carlin

#63. The circus had been unlike anything I could ever imagine and I could not walk away. I wanted to be a part of the magic, create it and wield it with such skill that it looked effortless. I wanted to fly.

Laura Lam

#64. These sociologists who talk to facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle.

Allan Bloom

#65. Taking a couple short backup swigs, Flint's crippling headache started to release its grip, sort of the way he imagined an octopus would release an inedible bowling ball.

Cole Alpaugh

#66. Vine, the Ringling Brothers circus, Friendster, horseshoes, pay phones, typewriters, etc. Things go out of business. Don't think it can't happen to Madison Avenue. Adapt or die.

Andrew Essex

#67. They seek each other out, these people of such specific like mind. They tell of how they found the circus, how those first few steps were like magic.

Erin Morgenstern

#68. But I think the children of actors share a certain pragmatic approach. One is denied some of that 'running away with the circus' element of being an actor.

Toby Jones

#69. How many of these children would one day be queer? How many would be felled by the acronym? How many by something else? How many would forget the circus? How many would never see it at all? How many would join?

Trebor Healey

#70. I think the movie business and film crews are a little bit like the circus, in that we travel around like a pack and we're a big family for a finite period of time. We roll into someplace, cause a bunch of damage, and then roll out.

Francis Lawrence

#71. And this is the straight dope, right here. These people are not exactly human. They don the dress but they're like monkeys dolled up in the circus. They're clever and can learn, but that is all.

Philip K. Dick

#72. Living as an actor is rather like living life on the trapezes in a circus. Every time you jump on, you have to pray that, when the time comes for you to jump off, there is another trapeze swinging your way.

Celia Imrie

#73. I can hardly conceive of any educated man believing in God at all without believing that God contains in Himself every perfection including eternal joy; and does not require the solar system to entertain Him like a circus.

G.K. Chesterton

#74. The main thing I like about New Yorkers is that they understand that their lives are a relentless circus of horrors, ending in death. As New Yorkers, we realize this, we resign ourselves to our fate, and we make sure that everyone else is as miserable as we are. Good town.

Kyle Baker

#75. I ran away from three different boarding schools before joining a circus school, and eventually I became an actor. The only thing I learned at boarding school was never to send my child to one.

Vincent Cassel

#76. I'm divorced and I've been to the circus and seen the clowns. This ain't my first rodeo.

Naomi Judd

#77. When I was little, one of my father's friends owned a circus. For four absolutely incredible summers, I found myself being the only boy in Ireland who didn't dream of running away with the circus. I was in it!

Ian Beattie

#78. There is a circus around politics. But if you think it is a game, then you forget what the purpose of politics actually is.

Johann Lamont

#79. In my day, MI6 - which I called the Circus in the books - stank of wartime nostalgia. People were defined by secret cachet: one man did something absolutely extraordinary in Norway; another was the darling of the French Resistance. We didn't even show passes to go in and out of the building.

John Le Carre

#80. When I was young, my family didn't go on outings to the circus or trips to Disneyland. We couldn't afford them. Instead, we stayed in our small rural West Texas town, and my parents took us to cemeteries.

Jenny Lawson

#81. Well, there's a piece of Maria in every song that I sing. And the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings. And there is always one last light to turn out and one last bell to ring. And the last one out of the circus has to lock up everything.

Counting Crows

#82. The rise and fall of Srinivasan, 70, will perhaps be remembered as cricket's most compelling narrative over a decade when the game transformed from a serious sport that generated bountiful revenues to a Twenty20 circus that made more money than anyone could ever imagine.

Anonymous

#83. She had always enjoyed the carte blanche accorded to mobsters, aristocrats, circus clowns, and lunatics

Simon Doonan

#84. I avoid the media circus, keep my head down and try to keep growing and learning things.

Georgie Fame

#85. If you bake a cupcake, the world has one more cupcake. If you become a circus clown, the world has one more squirt of seltzer down someone's pants. But if you win an Olympic gold medal, the world will not have one more Olympic gold medalist. It will just have you instead of someone else.

Steven E. Landsburg

#86. Painted and smiling, I balance on my trapeze. Luka is poised ten metres away, his muscles shining under the lights. The wooden circles in his earlobes twitch as his jaw clenches, unclenches, clenches.

Kirsty Logan

#87. There's a hell of a lot of freedom in this rock and roll circus ... it's where all the freaks go - it's the environment for me.

Brian Molko

#88. I am a Topshop homing pigeon! I can walk into the Oxford Circus branch and ferret out the best bits in minutes.

Ashley Madekwe

#89. Not let the child run the circus, just have that child be the source of the creative voice.

Billy Corgan

#90. The thing that's interesting about wire walking is that we never get to see it other than looking up. It's like a circus thing. It's a guy on a wire.

Robert Zemeckis

#91. It's a circus out there, mama
and your baby's got the sideshow blues.

Todd Snider

#92. Damn everything but the circus.

Corita Kent

#93. I spent the rest of my day in someone else's story. The rare moments that I put the book down, my own pain returned in burning stabs. I felt like a circus knife thrower's target. If I held my mind immobile, I might avoid being hit by the blades whizzing by my head.

Amy Plum

#94. People speak of the fear of the blank canvas as though it is a temporary hesitation, a trembling moment of self-doubt. For me it was more like being abducted from my bed by a clown, thrust into a circus arena with a wicker chair, and told to tame a pissed-off lion in front of an expectant crowd.

Hannah Kent

#95. My family traveled with a whole community to European festivals. My mum did gymnastics, freak show performances, and swung fire in the circus, so I followed her footsteps.

Neon Hitch

#96. A crowd of men stood in front of them. Of all ages, with expressions of sex-wonder in their eyes, gazing curiously as men who cannot solve a mystery that populates graveyards and through the ages has sent poets, popes, kings and fools to the junk heap.

Jim Tully

#97. That's the key to happiness," Abbey declares. "Join the right circus.

Paul Acampora

#98. Life is a circus when your intellect and your body alone are involved. Life is a dance, when the intelligence begins to play its role.

Jaggi Vasudev

#99. Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood.

Erica Jong

#100. All dance has expression. If there is no expression, I prefer the circus. The performers do more dangerous, more difficult technical things than we do. But we are dancers. We have to express and we have to project.

Luis De La Fuente