Circus Baby Quotes

For life today in America is based on the premise of ever-widening circles of contact and communication. It involves not only family demands, but community demands, national demands, international demands on the good citizen, through social and cultural pressures, through newspapers, magazines, radio programs, political drives, charitable appeals, and so on. My mind reels in it, What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. It puts the trapeze artist to shame. Look at us. We run a tight rope daily, balancing a pile of books on the head. Baby-carriage, parasol, kitchen chair, still under control. Steady now!

...take down your baby bump photos from Facebook, take down pictures of your kids too. It is your job to protect your children and not parade them around like little circus freaks or glorified mini-you’s.

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

What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. Look at us. We run a tightrope daily, balancing a pile of books on the head. Baby-carriage, parasol. kitchen chair, still under control. Steady now! This is not the life of a simplicity but the life of a multiplicity that the wise men warn us of.

After the dinner-and-interrogation. John stopped short on the sidewalk: The theater was gone. Instead, two gigantic clown faces grinned at him from the windows of a gleaming new restaurant. The faces were almost as large as the wide front door, painted on either side, and above them was a sign, in red and yellow neon letters: CIRCUS BABY’S PIZZA.

Here, just a minute.” He touched a drop of marsh water onto the slide, covered it with another, and focused the eyepiece. He stood. “Have a look.” Kya leaned over gently, as if to kiss a baby. The microscope’s light reflected in her dark pupils, and she drew in a breath as a Mardi Gras of costumed players pirouetted and careened into view. Unimaginable headdresses adorned astonishing bodies so eager for more life, they frolicked as though caught in a circus tent, not a single bead of water. She put her hand on her heart. “I had no idea there were so many and so beautiful,” she said, still looking. He identified some odd species, then stepped back, watching her. She feels the pulse of life, he thought, because there are no layers between her and her planet.

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.

He had done it all, from barnstorming to crop dusting, and had even flown a Davis Waco with the Baby Ruth Flying Circus.

Wanting All Husband, it's fine the way your mind performs Like a circus, sharp As a sword somebody has To swallow, rough as a bear, Complicated as a family of jugglers, Brave as a sequined trapeze Artist, the only boy I ever met Who could beat me in argument Was why I married you, isn't it, And you have beaten me, I've beaten you, We are old polished hands. Or was it your body, I forget, maybe I foresaw the thousands on thousands Of times we have made love Together, mostly meat And potatoes love, but sometimes Higher than wine, Better than medicine. How lately you bite, you baby, How angels record and number Each gesture, and sketch Our spinal columns like professionals. Husband, it's fine how we cook Dinners together while drinking, How we get drunk, how We gossip, work at our desks, dig in the garden, Go to the movies, tell The children to clear the bloody table, How we fit like puzzle pieces. The mind and body satisfy Like windows and furniture in a house. The windows are large, the furniture solid. What more do I want then, why Do I prowl the basement, why Do I reach for your inside Self as you shut it Like a trunkful of treasures? Wait, I cry, as the lid slams on my fingers.

Kya leaned over gently, as if to kiss a baby. The microscope's light reflected in her dark pupils, and she drew in a breath as a Mardi Gras of costumed players pirouetted and careened into view. Unimaginable headdresses adorned astonishing bodies so eager for more life, they frolicked as though caught in a circus tent, not a single bead of water.

He had done it all, from barnstorming to crop dusting, and had even flown a Davis Waco with the Baby Ruth Flying Circus. It was an advertising blitz unlike anything the country had ever seen. Billy would fly over county and state fairs, racetracks, and crowded beaches in his red and white plane, dropping hundreds of tiny rice paper parachutes—each one bearing a small Baby Ruth candy bar—on the crowds below.

Poets may be the “unacknowledged legislators” but I don’t know if we’re that important. My fear overwhelms me at times; I gave you my fear, a withered gift. You are the true poet of the family. You gave me the cry of a baby in its mother’s arms, cotton candy at the circus, John Cage exhibits at the museum, lying under the light of the full moon. You gave me Fellini films and old Romances, a glass of Burgandy in a darkened restaurant where lovers cling to hope of passion and contentment. You gave me hope and love, but most of all, you gave me poetry.

Lena?" He glanced at the dictionary. "Are you 'pleased, contented, joyful, delighted'? Do you feel 'Lucky, fortunate'? Are things 'clever and fitting,' 'successful and suitable' for you?" Lena stopped slicing vegetables and closed her eyes. "Read me the list again, please," she said. He shut the book. "What have I done, you got to stop and think an hour before you can tell me. All I ask is a simple yes or no! You're not contented, delighted, joyful?" "Cows are contented, babies and old people in second childhood are delighted, God help them," she said. "As for 'joyful,' Lee? Look how I laugh scrubbing out the sink . . ." He peered closely at her and his face relaxed. "Lena, it's true. A man doesn't appreciate. Next month, maybe, we'll get away." "I'm not complaining!" she cried. "I'm not the one comes in with a list saying/stick out your tongue. Lee, do you ask what makes your heart beat all night? No! Next will you ask, What's marriage? Who knows, Lee? Don't ask. A man who thinks like that, how it runs, how things work, falls off the trapeze in the circus, chokes wondering how the muscles work in the throat. Eat, sleep, breathe, Lee, and stop staring at me like I'm something new in the house!

In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things. They mostly don’t care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It’s about money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don’t have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who the real Americans are. Call it the “Rove 1-2.” That’s literally all it’s taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. Policywise, a typical Republican voter never even asks a politician to go to second base. While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn’t get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted.

These senators and representatives call themselves “leaders.” One of the primary principles of leadership is that a leader never asks or orders any follower to do what he or she would not do themselves. Such action requires the demonstration of the acknowledged traits of a leader among which are integrity, honesty, and courage, both physical and moral courage. They don’t have those traits nor are they willing to do what they ask and order. Just this proves we elect people who shouldn’t be leading the nation. When the great calamity and pain comes, it will have been earned and deserved. The piper always has to be paid at the end of the party. The party is about over. The bill is not far from coming due. Everybody always wants the guilty identified. The culprits are we the people, primarily the baby boom generation, which allowed their vote to be bought with entitlements at the expense of their children, who are now stuck with the national debt bill that grows by the second and cannot be paid off. These follow-on citizens—I call them the screwed generation—are doomed to lifelong grief and crushing debt unless they take the only other course available to them, which is to repudiate that debt by simply printing up $20 trillion, calling in all federal bills, bonds, and notes for payoff, and then changing from the green dollar to say a red dollar, making the exchange rate 100 or 1000 green dollars for 1 red dollar or even more to get to zero debt. Certainly this will create a great international crisis. But that crisis is coming anyhow. In fact it is here already. The U.S. has no choice but to eventually default on that debt. This at least will be a controlled default rather than an uncontrolled collapse. At present it is out of control. Congress hasn’t come up with a budget in 3 years. That’s because there is no way at this point to create a viable budget that will balance and not just be a written document verifying that we cannot legitimately pay our bills and that we are on an ever-descending course into greater and greater debt. A true, honest budget would but verify that we are a bankrupt nation. We are repeating history, the history we failed to learn from. The history of Rome. Our TV and video games are the equivalent distractions of the Coliseums and circus of Rome. Our printing and borrowing of money to cover our deficit spending is the same as the mixing and devaluation of the gold Roman sisteri with copper. Our dysfunctional and ineffectual Congress is as was the Roman Senate. Our Presidential executive orders the same as the dictatorial edicts of Caesar. Our open borders and multi-millions of illegal alien non-citizens the same as the influx of the Germanic and Gallic tribes. It is as if we were intentionally following the course written in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The military actions, now 11 years in length, of Iraq and Afghanistan are repeats of the Vietnam fiasco and the RussianAfghan incursion. Our creep toward socialism is no different and will bring the same implosion as socialism did in the U.S.S.R. One should recognize that the repeated application of failed solutions to the same problem is one of the clinical definitions of insanity. * * * I am old, ill, physically used up now. I can’t have much time left in this life. I accept that. All born eventually die and with the life I’ve lived, I probably should have been dead decades ago. Fate has allowed me to screw the world out of a lot of years. I do have one regret: the future holds great challenge. I would like to see that challenge met and overcome and this nation restored to what our founding fathers envisioned. I’d like to be a part of that. Yeah. “I’d like to do it again.” THE END PHOTOS Daniel Hill 1954 – 15

Coney Island Baby" You know, man, when I was a young man in high school You believe in or not, that I wanted to play football for the coach All those older guys, they said he was mean and cruel But you know, I wanted to play football, for the coach They said I was to little too light weight to play line-back So I say I'm playing right-in Wanted to play football for the coach Cause, you know some day, man, you gotta stand up straight Unless you're gonna fall Then you're gonna die And the straightest dude I ever knew Was standing right for me, all the time So I had to play football for the coach And I wanted to play football for the coach When you're all alone and lonely in your midnight hour And you find that your soul, it has been up for sale And you getting to think about, all the things you done And you getting to hate just about everything But remember the princess who lived on the hill Who loved you even though she knew you was wrong And right now she just might come shining through and the glory of love, glory of love Glory of love, just might come through And all your two-bit friends have gone and ripped you off They're talking behind your back saying, man you are never going to be a human being And you start thinking again About all those things that you've done And who it was and who it was And all the different things you made every different scene Ah, but remember that the city is a funny place Something like a circus or a sewer And just remember, different people have peculiar tastes And the Glory of love, the glory of love The glory of love, might see you through Yeah, but now, now Glory of love, the glory of love The glory of love, might see you through Glory of love, ah, huh, huh, the glory of love Glory of love, glory of love Glory of love, now, glory of love, now Glory of love, now, now, now, glory of love Glory of love, give it to me now, glory of love see you through Oh, my Coney Island baby, now (I'm a Coney Island baby, now) I'd like to send this one out for Lou and Rachel And the Lord appeared and he has one made of two Coney Island baby Man, I swear, I'd give the whole thing up for you Lou Reed, Coney Island Baby (1975)

Now more than ever, I realized it was just a matter of time before what happened to Mama would happen to me. They’d lock me in chains like a circus animal, strip away the baby making, then use me for a guinea pig. I peeked down at my gloves, plucked at the fingertips.

The survivors of a nuclear war will be able, if they can make their way to Hutchinson, Kansas, and get 200 metres (650 feet) down into the salt-shafts, to retrieve an assortment of objects which have been chosen partly with them in mind. There are seeds of hybrid plants, the files of various commercial enterprises, secret formulae for making brand-name products, food for the treasure-finders, and even folding cots, just in case they bring their babies with them. There is a film library which includes Gone with the Wind, Polly of the Circus, and lots of Buster Keaton.

Wise, gentle Stella, an old circus elephant who’d been born in the wild. Ruby, a sweet baby elephant snatched from Africa and shipped overseas, just like my sister and me. Julia, a kindhearted girl who understood our plight. And, of course, the one and only Bob, who slipped into my cage one night and decided that my tummy would make the perfect dog bed.

Whether we are simultaneously cooking dinner and sending emails while holding a baby or driving and eating breakfast while mentally organizing the day’s schedule, the circus act of being a mom forces us to do more than one thing at a time. As if that weren’t enough, we do so with a frequency and a mastery that none of the standardized cognitive tests would ever manage to measure. So please take heart, these shifts are in service to a bigger picture, not ones that leave you wanting down the road.

The streets of downtown Shanghai likewise seemed a continuous freak circus at first, unbelievably alive with all manner of people performing almost every physical and social function in public: yelling, gesturing, always acting, crushing throngs spilling through every kind of traffic, precariously amidst old cars and new ones and between coolies racing wildly to compete for ricksha fares, gingerly past "honey-carts" filled with excrement dragged down Bubbling Well Road, sardonically past perfumed, exquisitely gowned, mid-thigh-exposed Chinese ladies, jestingly past the Herculean bare-backed coolie trundling his taxi-wheelbarrow load of six giggling servant girls en route to home or work, carefully before singing peddlers bearing portable kitchens ready with delicious noodles on the spot, lovingly under gold-lettered shops overflowing with fine silks and brocades, dead-panning past village women staring wide-eyed at frightening Indian policemen, gravely past gambling mah-jongg ivories clicking and jai alai and parimutuel betting, slyly through streets hung with the heavy-sweet acrid smell of opium, sniffingly past southern restaurants and bright-lighted sing-song houses, indifferently past scrubbed, aloof young Englishmen in their Austins popping off to cricket on the Race Course, snickeringly round elderly white gentlemen in carriages with their wives or Russian mistresses out for the cool air along the Bund, and hastily past sailors looking for beer and women—from noisy dawn to plangent night the endless hawking and spitting, the baby's urine stream on the curb, the amah's scolding, the high falsetto of opera at Wing On Gardens where a dozen plays went on at once and hotel rooms next door filled up with plump virgins procured for wealthy merchants in from the provinces for business and debauch, the wail of dance bands moaning for slender bejeweled Chinese taxi dancers, the whiteness of innumerable beggars and their naked unwashed infants, the glamour of the Whangpoo with its white fleets of foreign warships, its shaggy freighters, its fan-sailed junks, its thousand lantern-lit sampans darting fire-flies on the moon-silvered water filled with deadly pollution. Shanghai!

He saw the clowns doing cartwheels at the end of the parade and once more he saw the face of his miserable solitude when everything had passed by and there was nothing but the bright expanse of the street and the air full of flying ants with a few onlookers peering into the precipice of uncertainty. Then he went to the chestnut tree, thinking about the circus, and while he urinated he tried to keep on thinking about the circus, but he could no longer find the memory. He pulled his head in between his shoulders like a baby chick and remained motionless with his forehead against the trunk of the chestnut tree. The family did not find him until the following day at eleven o’clock in the morning when Santa Sofía de la Piedad went to throw out the garbage in back and her attention was attracted by the descending vultures.

strong athletic body, and his brown hair combed nice and straight. He’d even cleaned his fingernails and washed his neck and ears, which I knew he didn’t like to do. There he was, sitting up straight and listening with shining eyes, in spite of knowing that as soon as the meeting was over he’d have to go home to a weathered old house with poor furniture and worn-out rugs on the floor and a swearing, drinking father who didn’t like him. I remembered the time about a month ago when Circus’s dad had been drunk on the same night they had a new baby at their house. Circus had stayed all night at my house. He and I were upstairs undressing, and he got tears in his eyes and doubled up his fists and looked terribly fierce because he was so mad at the people who made and sold beer and whiskey. That was the night he had said, his voice all trembly, “I wish they’d just once take a picture of my dad when he’s drunk and put that in their

If you’re 25 and announce you want to start a new circus, the response is different: Be realistic; become a lawyer or an accountant or a doctor, have babies, and raise them to repeat the cycle.

CHAPTER 1: BUG CIRCUS CHAPTER 2: THE MYSTERY PHOTO CHAPTER 3: PIP CHAPTER 4: THE DOORBELL CHAPTER 5: THE BARN CHAPTER 6: THE DOORBELL RINGS CHAPTER 7: HATCHING SNAKES CHAPTER 8: THE FOOD EXPERIMENT CHAPTER 9: SASSAFRAS? CHAPTER 10: THE CALL CHAPTER 11: WHAT SHOULD BABY DRAGONS EAT? CHAPTER 12: CARNIVORE? OMNIVORE?

Coney Island Baby" You know, man, when I was a young man in high school You believe in or not, that I wanted to play football for the coach All those older guys, they said he was mean and cruel But you know, I wanted to play football, for the coach They said I was to little too light weight to play line-back So I say I'm playing right-in Wanted to play football for the coach Cause, you know some day, man, you gotta stand up straight Unless you're gonna fall Then you're gonna die And the straightest dude I ever knew Was standing right for me, all the time So I had to play football for the coach And I wanted to play football for the coach When you're all alone and lonely in your midnight hour And you find that your soul, it has been up for sale And you getting to think about, all the things you done And you getting to hate just about everything But remember the princess who lived on the hill Who loved you even though she knew you was wrong And right now she just might come shining through and the glory of love, glory of love Glory of love, just might come through And all your two-bit friends have gone and ripped you off They're talking behind your back saying, man you are never going to be a human being And you start thinking again About all those things that you've done And who it was and what it was And all the different things you made every different scene Ah, but remember that the city is a funny place Something like a circus or a sewer And just remember, different people have peculiar tastes And the Glory of love, the glory of love The glory of love, might see you through Yeah, but now, now Glory of love, the glory of love The glory of love, might see you through Glory of love, ah, huh, huh, the glory of love Glory of love, glory of love Glory of love, now, glory of love, now Glory of love, now, now, now, glory of love Glory of love, give it to me now, glory of love see you through Oh, my Coney Island baby, now (I'm a Coney Island baby, now) I'd like to send this one out for Lou and Rachel And the Lord appeared and he has one made of two Coney Island baby Man, I swear, I'd give the whole thing up for you Lou Reed, Coney Island Baby (1975)

FROM THE OPEN DOOR IN THE VESTIBULE, I see her. She is sitting in a cotton housedress on a baby blue, plastic-covered easy chair by the window. She is looking through a parting of the curtains at the street circus below. There they are, all scuffling beneath her: urban drug dealers, falling-down sweatpants pooling at their feet, now bent over the driver’s-side window of a

Then he went to the chestnut tree, thinking about the circus, and while he urinated he tried to keep thinking about the circus, but he could no longer find the memory. He pulled his head between his shoulders like a baby chick and remained motionless with his forehead against the trunk of the chestnut tree. The family did not find him until the following day at eleven o'clock in the morning when Santa Sofia de la Piedad went to throw out the garbage in the back and her attention was attracted by the descending vultures.

Donovan Grant was the result of a midnight union between a German professional weight-lifter and a Southern Irish waitress. The union lasted for a quarter of an hour on the damp grass behind a circus tent outside Belfast. Afterwards the father gave the mother half-a-crown and the mother walked happily home to her bed in the kitchen of a cafe near the railway station. When the baby was expected, she went to live with an aunt in the small village of Aughmacloy that straddles the border, and there, six months later, she died of puerperal fever shortly after giving birth to a twelve-pound boy. Before she died, she said that the boy was to be called Donovan (the weight-lifter had styled himself 'The Mighty O'Donovan') and Grant, which was her own name.