Circus Clown Quotes

The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.

I think I'll be a clown when I get grown,' said Dill. Jem and I stopped in our tracks. Yes sir, a clown,' he said. 'There ain't one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I'm gonna join the circus and laugh my head off.' You got it backwards, Dill,' said Jem. 'Clowns are sad, it's folks that laugh at them.' Well I'm gonna be a new kind of clown. I'm gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks.

The clown may be the source of mirth, but - who shall make the clown laugh?

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?

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.

Despair is the constant companion of the clown.

I want to be Empress.” “Oh, Theodora, don’t be insane.” Antonina took her friend’s hands. “Do you really think a circus clown can become a queen?” “There’s no fruit without a flower.” “But an Empress? Maybe in a thousand years.” “All I have is today.” She stiffened her backbone, like a fluttery leaf changing into an oak. “And I won’t be defeated by a failure of imagination.

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.

I took the Nuban's bow. I didn't trust the midget to be able to run down any thieves, and besides, I might want to shoot a circus clown or two. Just for laughs.

But most of the time, we keep memories packed away. I sometimes liken that moment of sudden unpacking to circus clowns pouring out of a miniature car trunk—how did so much fit into such a small space?

You laugh because what's fearful and unknown is also what's funny, you laugh the way a small child will sometimes laugh and cry at the same time when a capering circus clown approaches, knowing it is supposed to be funny... but it is also unknown, full of the unknown's eternal power.

My high school guidance counselor, Mrs. Inverholl, once had me take an aptitude test to figure out my future. The number one job recommendation for my set of skills was an air traffic accident investigator, of which there are fewer than fifty in the world. The number two job was a museum curator for Chinese-American studies. The number three job was a circus clown.

Just because everyone is behaving like a clown, it doesn’t mean you have to join the circus.

I think I'll be a clown when I get grown," said Dill. "Yes, sir, a clown... There ain't one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I'm gonna join the circus and laugh my head off.

Same circus, different clowns, and without a doubt I'm one of them.

When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king, the palace becomes a circus.

He said that academia reminded him of a badly run circus. The faculty members were like underfed animals -- weary of their cages, which were never large enough to begin with -- and they responded sluggishly to the whip. The trapeze artists fell with monotonous regularity into poorly strung nets. The clowns looked hungry. The tent leaked. The crowd was inattentive, shouting incoherently at inappropriate moments. And when the show was over, no one cheered.

I’ve been to that circus and I’ve seen all the clowns.

The washroom door swung open, and all thoughts of pirates vanished. A tall boy walked inside, dressed in black clothes at least two sizes too tight. His cherry-red hair stood in haphazard spikes, and his eyes were heavily lined in kohl. If a rock star had an affair with a circus clown, this guy would be the result. It took a few moments to recognize him as Doran.

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.

I like the circus, because they make a business out of being a clown show. But I hate The Chamber of Commerce, because they make a clown show out of business. In between those two extremes is my duck farm.

But if as you read this book you're saying to yourself: "I'd rather be miserably married than be alone." Well young lady, take out your clown shoes and buckle your seat belt - it's going to be a very bumpy one-woman circus.

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.

One of the reasons circus clowns terrify sensitive individuals is because their image triggers an instinctual response within us concerning a collective archetypal folk memory of the potential evil which might lay behind the painted-on smile. We know the smile of the circus clown is fake and that underneath the expression can be a malicious sneer.

America is ceasing to be a nation, and turning into a giant television show. And this Republican race is our first and most brutal casting call.

How Giuliani is not Trump's running mate no one will ever understand. Theirs is the most passionate love story since Beavis and Butthead.

Why did he warn me about a circus? Isn’t it supposed to be a fun place? Unless you meet the clown, of course.

Clowns are respectable only in a circus.

Not your circus, not your clown, I reminded myself. Just because your instinct is to care doesn’t mean you have to.

Risking your own life in order to entertain others is the height of stupidity.

The kind of happy I was that day at the Vet when "Hawk" Dawson actually doffed his red "C" cap to me, and everyone cheered and practically convulsed into tears - you can't patent that. It was one shining moment of glory that was instantly gone. Whereas life, real life, is different and can't even be appraised as simply "happy", but only in terms of "Yes, I'll take it all, thanks" or "No, I believe I won't." Happy, as my poor father used to say, is a lot of hooey. Happy is a circus clown, a sitcom, a greeting card. Life, though, life's about something sterner. But also something better. A lot better. Believe me.

Our Cross Our little circle hides in the mind, It's difficult to miss but hard to find, It goes unspoken but yet it speaks, From backward years to forward weeks, We can't forget but why even try, Two of a kind doesn't know goodbye, It's a silent question that God won't share, A breeze we feel but seems unfair, Distant, rare but only madness can see, It's something deeper than any infinity, Because we walk this parallel path up and down, There is no circle to hold us circus clowns, So let's give it a symbol and label it a loss, We will remember it always as we carry our cross.

Sometimes it seems' said Grok, 'that the faces exist of themselves, in a disembodied somewhere, waiting for the clown who will wear them, who will bring them to life. Faces that wait in the mirrors of unknown dressing-rooms, unseen in the depths of the glass like fish in dusty pools, fish that will rise up out of the obscure profundity when they spot the one who anxiously scrutinises his own reflection for the face it lacks, man eating fish waiting to gobble up your being and give you another instead...

America has been trending stupid for a long time. Now the stupid wants out of its cage, and Trump is urging it on.

The man who once famously pronounced “I know words, I have the best words” scorched through the primaries using the vocabulary of a signing gorilla (“China—money—bad!”).

TV is the ultimate leveling phenomenon. It makes everyone, rich and poor, equally incapable of dealing with reality. That

If you surround yourself with clowns, don't be surprised when your life resembles a circus.

My circus train pulls through the night Full of lions and trapeze artists I'm done with elephants and clowns I want to run away and join the office

Clowns are made by those who made a circus out of life.

I like the circus, because they make a business out of being a clown show. But I hate The Chamber of Commerce, because they make a clown show out of business.

God is just one more Clown In this Circus of mine (from song "no tunnel too dark")

There’s no point in advertising a circus when everybody hates the clown.

Sixty million people were announcing that they preferred one reality to another. Inherent in this decision was the revolutionary idea that you can choose your own set of facts. Blue-state

It was not all that different from the circus, and it came to town in much the same way. Only instead of elephants and giraffes, there were cameras and microphones. Instead of clowns and cages and tightropes, there were production assistants and trailers and yards upon yards of thick cables.

To actually make you believe that your problems were spiritual and mental but absolutely not boozical. Good Christ, just the alcohol-related loss of the REM sleep was enough to screw you up righteously, but somehow you never thought of that while you were active. Booze turned your thought-processes into something akin to that circus routine where all the clowns come piling out of the little car.

Remember back in forty-four when someone killed that pet parrot of yours? What was his name, Reynold? You know, the only friend you ever had? That was me, George. I fucked it to death then fed it to Goshy.

I think I’ll be a clown when I get grown,’ said Dill. Jem and I stopped in our tracks. ‘Yes sir, a clown,’ he said. ‘There ain’t one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I’m gonna join the circus and laugh my head off.’ ‘You got it backwards, Dill,’ said Jem. ‘Clowns are sad, it’s folks that laugh at them.

Did I tell you about Anton?" Loots said. Anton?" I shook my head. It was a week ago, Loots said. There had been a knock on the door of his apartment and when he opened it his old friend Anton was standing there. Anton was a clown. He belonged to a circus that toured the provinces, playing to small towns and villages. They talked about the old days for a while, but Anton became increasingly restless and distracted. In the end Loots had to ask him if there was something wrong. This is going to sound strange." The clown coughed nervously into his fist. "It's The Invisible Man. He's disappeared." Loots stared at his friend. He just vanished," Anton said, "into thin air." The Invisible Man?" Loots said. Yes." He's disappeared?" I told you it would sound strange," Anton said.

I weep to think of all the tricks you’ve played on me since I’ve had you for a husband …and now, as if all that weren’t enough, you decide to become a circus clown. A penny-a-liner! And to think there are even worse fools than you who will pay to read what you write!

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.

EVERY WEDNESDAY, I teach an introductory fiction workshop at Harvard University, and on the first day of class I pass out a bullet-pointed list of things the students should try hard to avoid. Don’t start a story with an alarm clock going off. Don’t end a story with the whole shebang having been a suicide note. Don’t use flashy dialogue tags like intoned or queried or, God forbid, ejaculated. Twelve unbearably gifted students are sitting around the table, and they appreciate having such perimeters established. With each variable the list isolates, their imaginations soar higher. They smile and nod. The mood in the room is congenial, almost festive with learning. I feel like a very effective teacher; I can practically hear my course-evaluation scores hitting the roof. Then, when the students reach the last point on the list, the mood shifts. Some of them squint at the words as if their vision has gone blurry; others ask their neighbors for clarification. The neighbor will shake her head, looking pale and dejected, as if the last point confirms that she should have opted for that aseptic-surgery class where you operate on a fetal pig. The last point is: Don’t Write What You Know. The idea panics them for two reasons. First, like all writers, the students have been encouraged, explicitly or implicitly, for as long as they can remember, to write what they know, so the prospect of abandoning that approach now is disorienting. Second, they know an awful lot. In recent workshops, my students have included Iraq War veterans, professional athletes, a minister, a circus clown, a woman with a pet miniature elephant, and gobs of certified geniuses. They are endlessly interesting people, their lives brimming with uniquely compelling experiences, and too often they believe those experiences are what equip them to be writers. Encouraging them not to write what they know sounds as wrongheaded as a football coach telling a quarterback with a bazooka of a right arm to ride the bench. For them, the advice is confusing and heartbreaking, maybe even insulting. For me, it’s the difference between fiction that matters only to those who know the author and fiction that, well, matters.

If you've never come across Soccer Saturday, imagine a Samuel Beckett play in which a slick circus-master gets four retired clowns to describe a performance to punters stuck outside the Big Top. You will still be nowhere close to the absurcist drama that unfolds for six straight hours each Saturday on Sky Sports 1

Life is a great big beautiful three-ring circus. There are those on the floor making their lives among the heads of lions and hoops of fire, and those in the stands, complacent and wowed, their mouths stuffed with popcorn. I know less now than ever about life, but I do know its size. Life is enormous. Much grander than what we’ve taken for ourselves, so far. When the show is over and the tent is packed, the elephants, lions and dancing poodles are caged and mounted on trucks to caravan to the next town. The clown’s makeup has worn, and his bright, red smile has been washed down a sink. All that is left is another performance, another tent and set of lights. We rest in the knowledge: the show must go on. Somewhere, behind our stage curtain, a still, small voice asks why we haven’t yet taken up juggling. My seminars were like this. Only, instead of flipping shiny, black bowling balls or roaring chainsaws through the air, I juggled concepts. The world is intrinsically tied together. All things march through time at different intervals but move ahead in one fashion or another. Though we may never understand it, we are all part of something much larger than ourselves—something anchoring us to the spot we have mentally chosen. We sniff out the rules, through spiritual quests and the sciences. And with every new discovery, we grow more confused. Our inability to connect what seems illogical to unite and to defy logic in our understanding keeps us from enlightenment. The artists and insane tiptoe around such insights, but lack the compassion to hand-feed these concepts to a blind world. The interconnectedness of all things is not simply a pet phrase. It is a big “T” truth that the wise spend their lives attempting to grasp.

It will go down someday as the greatest reality show ever conceived. The concept is ingenious. Take a combustible mix of the most depraved and filterless half-wits, scam artists and asylum Napoleons America has to offer, give them all piles of money and tell them to run for president. Add Donald Trump. And to give the whole thing a perverse gravitas, make the presidency really at stake. It’s Western civilization’s very own car wreck. Even if you don’t want to watch it, you will. It’s that awesome of a spectacle. But

Lots of people have remarked on the irony of this absurd caricature of a spoiled rich kid connecting so well with working-class America. But Trump does have something very much in common with everybody else. He watches TV. That’s his primary experience with reality, and just like most of his voters, he doesn’t realize that it’s a distorted picture. If

What a head for just a boy to have! If I had Tom Sawyer’s head, I wouldn’t trade it off to be a duke, nor mate of a steamboat, nor clown in a circus, nor nothing I can think of.

Yes sir, a clown,” he said. “There ain’t one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I’m gonna join the circus and laugh my head off.

Win or lose, Trump’s campaign threatens to unleash the Great American Stupid S

in less than a year Trump has succeeded in turning the USA into a massive high school—the candidate beams. What

It may not seem funny now, because it’s happening to us, but centuries from this moment, people will laugh in wonder.

Elections, like criminal trials, are ultimately always about assigning blame.

Get your liver ready: the second GOP debate is upon us S

Donald Trump, if elected, would find a way to turn being the president into a moneymaking operation. Sanders

One clown sleeping in a car is not tragic. One clown sleeping with your wife in his car—tragic. Especially if you’re inside the tent enjoying the circus.

Well, if this is the Circus,’ he said, referencing the slang term for the Secret Service, ‘then Section 37 is where we keep the clowns. And frankly, they’re welcome to you.’ He

There’s ways to bring out the clown in you.

If i'm gonna be described as a clown for my actions, I might aswell be a whole circus

In reality the ego is like the clown in the circus, who is always putting in his oar to make the audience think that whatever happens is his doing.

Trump taught us how easily seemingly serious people can become profoundly idiotic. He turned career politicians into circus freaks.

But it isn’t just my parents,’ Rhys replied. ‘There’s my aunty and uncle and at least four cousins. I mean, it’s a proper circus, clowns included.

Circus is an absolute disgrace of the humanity! Real clowns are those who support and maintain the circuses! Honourable men want a simple thing: Along with freedom for men, freedom for Animals too!

Donald Trump, a man whose idea of policy is a big wall, was the Republican front-runner for months, and ceded the lead to a man who wants to fight immigrants with drones. This whole thing is a joke.

Anyone who takes a close-enough look at how we run elections in this country will conclude that the process is designed to be regressive. It distracts us with trivialities and drives us apart during two years of furious arguments. It's a divide-and-conquer mechanism that keeps us from communicating with one another, and prevents us from examining the broader, systematic problems we all face together.

-I think I'll be a clown when I get grown-said Dill. Jem and I stopped in our tracks. "Yes sir, a clown." he said. "There ain't one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I'm gonna join the circus and laugh my head off.

Duck Dynasty viewers think they're the experts on hunting, but actually they're the hunted ones, just another dumb demographic to be captured, laughed at and force-fed commercials for Geico and Home Depot by the Smart People in New York and L.A.

The party worked the cattle in their pen into such a dither that now they won’t rest until they get the giant wall that real-life, as-seen-on-TV billionaire Donald Trump promises will save them from all those measles-infected rapists pouring over the border. Not

Meanwhile the pessimism of Trump’s revolution is intentional, impassioned, ascendant. They placed a huge bet on America’s worst instincts, and won. And the first order of business will be to wipe out a national idea in which they never believed. Welcome to the end of the dream.

Even in his books, where he’s allegedly trying to string multiple thoughts together, Trump wanders randomly from impulse to impulse, seemingly without rhyme or reason. He doesn’t think anything through. (He’s brilliantly cast this driving-blind trait as “not being politically correct.”) It

It was also the content. Trump sold hate, violence, xenophobia, racism, and ignorance, which oddly enough had long been permissible zones of exploration for American television entertainment. And the news media was becoming more and more indistinguishable from entertainment media. Meanwhile,

As she draws level the flickering light strikes her. But under closer scrutiny she is not the young firefox that I presumed she was. With that posture, that chin held so high, those cold beautiful eyes, that tight tapering skirt and those feet mounted on pedestals with heels like blades, how could I have been so wrong? Her hair is not blonde, but white. The dead white of the pantomime wig. That haughty catwalk face is actually more like a skull too, with aged parchment stretched across it; a dry surface freshly painted with a palette more suited to the circus clown than the city girl.

Trump has blown up even the backroom version of the issues-driven campaign. There are no secret donors that we know of. Trump himself appears to be the largest financial backer of the Trump campaign. A financial report disclosed that Trump lent his own campaign $1.8 million while raising just $100,000. There

The final insult to all of this is that when Trump secured the nomination, media companies looked down at their bottom lines and realized that, via the profits they made during his run—Trump is “good for business,” CBS president Les Moonves infamously confessed—they had been made accomplices to the whole affair. —

When the clowns of British politics - arch-Brexiteer cartoon characters 'Boorish Johnson' and 'JackOff Grease-Smug' advocate ad infinitum that Britain should leave the EU in order to be free to sign her own trade deals; they seem to have overlooked the towering elephant in the room, namely the current occupant of the White House (another clown) - who appears hell-bent on destabilising world trade via crude protectionist policies. Both Tories, despite receiving the best British education money can buy, would do well to revisit their post war history books and be reminded of one of the key objectives of the European Project and in due course the European Union - specifically to promote peace and prosperity amongst previously warring neighbours by forming a unified trading bloc which in time, due to its effective size, also acted as a useful counterweight to US hegemony. Go find another circus for your buffoonery and leave the deadly serious business of politics to principled individuals with the true national interest at heart !

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.

The cruel come and go like cities and thrones and powers, leaving their ruins behind them. They had no permanence. But the clown whom he had seen last year with Milly at the circus—that clown was permanent, for his act never changed. That was the way to live; the clown was unaffected by the vagaries of public men and the enormous discoveries of the great.

What I do know is that I have never found clowns remotely funny. I am not alone in this, I think. More people find clowns disturbing or distressing rather than raucously amusing. Is it that the nature of human existence has changed so radically in the last century or so that what was funny to our grandparents and great-grandparents is now tragic or terrifying?

The only candidate to really escape Trump’s wrath has been Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, and that’s because Cruz has spent the entire political season nuzzling Trump’s ankles, praising the Donald like a lovesick cellmate. The Texas senator, whose rhetorical schtick is big doses of Tea Party crazy (his best line was that Obama wanted to bring “expanded Medicaid” to ISIS)

Why there’s suddenly this surge of hatred for immigrants is sort of a mystery. Why Donald Trump, who’s probably never even interacted with an undocumented immigrant in a non-commercial capacity, in particular should care so much about this issue is even more obscure. (Did he trip over an immigrant on his way to the Cincinnati housing development his father gave him as a young man?) Most

The Vagabond Circus was different than all the rest in many ways and the first was it had no clowns. Not a single red, round nose in the whole troupe. Maybe that was the reason that Dave had decided he’d be the silliest ringmaster in all of history. His job was to lead and move the events of the show along but he was less a Master of Ceremony and more a buffer between the jaw dropping acts.

I then ask them to turn these things upside down—to imagine the exact opposite of each one. For example, the new list would include a small tent, no animals, expensive seats, no barkers, one act performing at a time, sophisticated music, and no clowns or popcorn. They then pick the things they want to keep from the traditional circus and the things they want to change. The result is a brand-new type of circus, à la Cirque du Soleil.

In the modern Republican Party, making sense is a secondary consideration. Years of relentless propaganda combined with extreme frustration over the disastrous Bush years and two terms of a Kenyan Muslim terrorist president have cast the party’s right wing into a swirling suckhole of paranoia and conspiratorial craziness. There is nothing you can do to go too far, a fact proved, if not exactly understood, by the madman, Trump. Huckabee

The Republicans already lost virtually the entire black vote (scoring just 4 percent and 6 percent of black voters the last two elections). Now, by pushing toward the nomination a candidate whose brilliant plan to “make America great again” is to build a giant wall to keep out Mexican rapists, they’re headed the same route with Hispanics. That’s a steep fall for a party that won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote as recently as 2004. Trump

Sanders is a clear outlier in a generation that has forgotten what it means to be a public servant. The Times remarks upon his “grumpy demeanor.” But Bernie is grumpy because he’s thinking about vets who need surgeries, guest workers who’ve had their wages ripped off, kids without access to dentists or some other godforsaken problem that most of us normal people can care about for maybe a few minutes on a good day, but Bernie worries about more or less all the time.

Setting aside the puppet shows, the only thing that matters is who will be ruling, who will have the keys to the cash register, and how they're going to split up other people's money among themselves. On their way to the booty they'll spruce everything up, which is badly needed. New Scoundrels will appear, new leaders, and a whole choir of jnnocents with no memory will come out into the streets, ready to believe whatever they want or need to believe. They'll follow whichever Pied Piper flatters them most and promises them some shotty paradise... This is what it is... with its highs and lows, and it's only as good as it gets, which is better than nothing. There are those who see it coming and go far away... And there are those of us who stay with our feet stuck in the mud, because anyhow we don't have anywhere better to go. But don't worry about the circus. We've now come to the clown acts, and the trapeze artists will take a while to arrive.

IN THE SMALL Ohio town where I grew up, many homes had parlors that contained pianos, sideboards, and sofas, heavy objects signifying gentility. These pianos were rarely tuned. They went flat in summer around the Fourth of July and sharp in winter at Christmas. Ours was a Story and Clark. On its music stand were copies of Stephen Foster and Ethelbert Nevin favorites, along with one Chopin prelude that my mother would practice for twenty minutes every three years. She had no patience, but since she thought Ohio—all of it, every scrap—made sense, she was happy and did not need to practice anything. Happiness is not infectious, but somehow her happiness infected my father, a pharmacist, and then spread through the rest of the household. My whole family was obstinately cheerful. I think of my two sisters, my brother, and my parents as having artificial, pasted-on smiles, like circus clowns. They apparently thought cheer and good Christian words were universals, respected everywhere. The pianos were part of this cheer. They played for celebrations and moments of pleasant pain. Or rather, someone played them, but not too well, since excellent playing would have been faintly antisocial. “Chopin,” my mother said, shaking her head as she stumbled through the prelude. “Why is he famous?

Charlotte was used to all the marks of war: the shabbiness of things, bad food, shop queues, posters about the war effort, people with worried faces, people dressed in black. She was used to seeing the wounded men from the hospital with their bright blue uniforms and bright red ties, the colours, she thought, if not the clothes of Arthur's soldiers. Such things did not disturb her, and the war seemed quite remote. But this disturbed her, the grotesque kind of circus that came now. It did not seem remote at all, nor did it fit with her vague ideas of war gained from those books of Arthur's she had read, with their flags and glory and brave drummer boys. How could you dare to become a soldier, knowing that you might end like this? There were men like clowns with white heads, white arms, white legs, men with crutches, slings, and bloodied bandages, and all so distressingly like men you would expect to see walking down the street, two armed, two legged, in hats instead of bandages and suits of black not battered khaki. Some came on stretchers borne by whole and ordinary men, some hobbled and leaned on whole ordinary arms. Most had mud dried thick across their clothes, and all came from the dark station's mouth with the spewings of trains behind, the clankings, thumpings, grindings, the sounds like great devils taking in breaths and blowing them out again.

Academia is an odd place. Stately buildings and ivy, wrought iron fences, and libraries fragrant with the smell of old books. Young people scurry to and from class, fresh, energetic, and naive. But in the long halls and narrow offices, those who work there fester in the dark like overeducated viral agents. Wet-eyed professors with obscure, irrelevant specialties and inferiority complexes browbeat students. Administrators, buffeted by faculty contempt and general inefficiency, sink into venal scheming. Any college campus is a circus, complete with color, entertainment, and the occasional glimpse of something really amazing. At Dorian University, the circus had a large number of clowns and a truly impressive freak show.

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.

Often, when I went out for breakfast on Sunday morning, at the Mediterranean place around the corner, I was seated by a dancer who’d been a year ahead of me at school and waited on by a painter who’d been two years ahead. At night, Don and I could meet Lauren for Thai food, or Leigh and Allison for gin and tonics at the Rat Pack–era bar on Bedford and watch an alternative circus, which involved one college friend of mine eating fire, another clowning in the style of Jacques Lecoq, another riding a unicycle and playing trombone. For me, this was heaven, heaven that could only be improved by Jenny moving in down the street. For Jenny, though, it turned out this was hell. She had cast off such childish things. Heaven was, she told me, eyes shining, driving to a large supermarket and unloading a week’s worth of groceries directly into her apartment from her designated parking spot.

Jolly Marchers by Maisie Aletha Smikle Dam Dam Didley Doe Dee Daw Didley Doe Dee Dam Doe Fa So La Ti Doe Animals in a row Prancing as they go Jiggling and Wiggling Tails and head bobbing Mice on drums Elephants on flute Zebras blare the trumpets Squirrels blow trombones Skunks get funky on clarinets Bees on violins Hogs on guitar Parrots and crickets sing Aha Aha Vultures cheer Mosquitoes twirl Wings clapping and flapping Heads go up and down bobbing Marching and skanking Rocking and bobbing Wiggling and singing Dee Daw Didley Doe This is not a circus There are no clowns There is not a palace There are no crowns On and on they go Monkeys in tow Tigers in bow Onlookers stare and glow Donkey takes the podium As conductor of the band Waving his marching wand The band comes to a stand Mule takes a stool And sits in the cool They have reached the bend Where the march ends The ants were nesting So they missed the fest Some got on tambourines And insist they must join in The ants jiggle and wiggle Some play the fiddle Dancing and singing Didley Dam Didley Doe

I thought we might even retell some of the stories she used to invent for us." "Like the one about the gate at the bottom of the garden that led to fairyland." "And the dragon eggs she found in the woods." "And the time she ran away to join the circus." "Do you remember," said Iris suddenly, "the circus we had here?" "My circus," said Daphne, beaming from behind her wineglass. "Well, yes," Iris interjected, "but only because-" "Because I'd had the horrid measles and missed the real circus when it came to town." Daphne laughed with pleasure at the memory. "She got Daddy to build a tent at the bottom of the meadow, remember, and organized all of you to be clowns. Laurel was a lion, and Mummy walked the tightrope." "She was rather good at that," said Iris. "Barely fell off the rope. She must've practiced for weeks." "Or else her story was true and she really did spend time in the circus," said Rose. "I can almost believe it of Mummy." Daphne gave a contented sigh. "We were lucky to have a mother like ours, weren't we? So playful, almost as if she hadn't fully grown up, not at all like other people's boring old mothers.

Hi, Georgie,” it said. George blinked and looked again. He could barely credit what he saw; it was like something from a made-up story, or a movie where you know the animals will talk and dance. If he had been ten years older, he would not have believed what he was seeing, but he was not sixteen. He was six. There was a clown in the stormdrain. The light in there was far from good, but it was good enough so that George Denbrough was sure of what he was seeing. It was a clown, like in the circus or on TV. In fact he looked like a cross between Bozo and Clarabell, who talked by honking his (or was it her?—George was never really sure of the gender) horn on Howdy Doody Saturday mornings—Buffalo Bob was just about the only one who could understand Clarabell, and that always cracked George up. The face of the clown in the stormdrain was white, there were funny tufts of red hair on either side of his bald head, and there was a big clown-smile painted over his mouth. If George had been inhabiting a later year, he would have surely thought of Ronald McDonald before Bozo or Clarabell. The clown held a bunch of balloons, all colors, like gorgeous ripe fruit in one hand. In the other he held George’s newspaper boat. “Want your boat, Georgie?” The clown smiled.

But the clown whom he had seen last year with Milly at the circus – that clown was permanent, for his act never changed. That was the way to live; the clown was unaffected by the vagaries of public men and the enormous discoveries of the great. Wormold began to make faces in the glass. ‘What on earth are you doing, Father?’ ‘I wanted to make myself laugh.’ Milly giggled. ‘I thought you were being sad and serious.’ ‘That’s why I wanted to laugh. Do you remember the clown last year, Milly?’ ‘He walked off the end of a ladder and fell in a bucket of whitewash.’ ‘He falls in it every night at ten o’clock. We should all be clowns, Milly. Don’t ever learn from experience.’ ‘Reverend Mother says …’ ‘Don’t pay any attention to her. God doesn’t learn from experience, does He, or how could He hope anything of man? It’s the scientists who add the digits and make the same sum who cause the trouble. Newton discovering gravity – he learned from experience and after that …’ ‘I thought it was from an apple.’ ‘It’s the same thing. It was only a matter of time before Lord Rutherford went and split the atom. He had learned from experience too, and so did the men of Hiroshima. If only we had been born clowns, nothing bad would happen to us except a few bruises and a smear of whitewash. Don’t learn from experience, Milly. It ruins our peace and our lives.

This dance was the dance of death, and they danced it for George Buffins, that they might be as him. They danced it for the wretched of the earth, that they might witness their own wretchedness. They danced the dance of the outcasts for the outcasts who watched them, amid the louring trees, with a blizzard coming on. And, one by one, the outcast outlaws raised their heads to watch and all indeed broke out in laughter but it was a laughter without joy. It was the bitter laugh one gives when one sees there is no triumph over fate. When we saw those cheerless arabesques as of the damned, and heard that laughter of those trapped in the circles of hell, Liz and I held hands, for comfort. They danced the night into the clearing, and the outlaws welcomed it with cheers. They danced the perturbed spirit of their master, who came with a great wind and blew cold as death into the marrow of the bones. They danced the whirling apart of everything, the end of love, the end of hope; they danced tomorrows into yesterdays; they danced the exhaustion of the implacable present; they danced the deadly dance of the past perfect which fixes everything fast so it can’t move again; they danced the dance of Old Adam who destroys the world because we believe he lives forever. The outlaws entered into the spirit of the thing with a will. With ‘huzzahs’ and ‘bravos’, all sprang up and flung themselves into the wild gavotte, firing off their guns. The snow hurled wet, white sheets in our faces, and the wind took up the ghastly music of the old clowns and amplified it fit to drive you crazy. Then the snow blinded us and Samson picked us up one by one and slung us back in that shed and leaned up hard against the door, forcing it closed against the tempest with his mighty shoulders. Though bullets crashed into the walls and the wind came whistling through the knotholes and picked up burning embers from the fire, hurling them about until we thought we might burn to death in the middle of the snow and ice, the shed held firm. It rocked this way and that way and it seemed at any moment the roof might be snatched away, but this little group of us who, however incoherently, placed our faiths in reason, were not exposed to the worst of the storm. The Escapee, however, faced with this insurrection of militant pessimism, turned pale and wan and murmured to himself comforting phrases of Kropotkin, etc., as others might, in such straits, recite the rosary. When the storm passed, as pass it did, at last, the freshly fallen snow made all as new and put the camp fire out. Here, there was a shred of scarlet satin and, there, Grik’s little violin with the strings broken but, of the tents, shacks, muskets and cuirasses of the outlaws, the clowns and the clowns themselves, not one sight, as if all together had been blown off the face of the earth.

Maybe you should watch. Why? I've been to that circus and I'm not impressed to the clowns. Because the clown is a joke to everyone except the clown.

In a restaurant, I can’t sit with my back to the door. Not sure if I’m OCD, but I excel at organizational skills. Slightly claustrophobic, not crazy about heights. Love martinis but one is enough. Tend to be opinionated at times but good at reigning it in. Love long-legged women, clueless about cars, love trucks. I read several dozen books a year, cook every night, and am uncomfortable if music isn’t playing. Don’t like scat singing or modulation, jazz is my preferred music, and my favorite colors are black and dark blue. Have no problem eating on my own in a restaurant, have to have a dog, and hate clowns and circuses. I’d never heard a Pink Floyd album until 2015, Penderecki’s “Polish Requiem” can make me cry, love trains, and am a confirmed sushi snob. I’ve never wanted to be anyone else, but if I had to choose I’d be Michael Caine.

Then the music. It’s jazz and yet not jazz. There’s something euphoric, disconnected about it. Like four instruments that have run amok. But it fools you. Because there is also a strange precision to it. Like a clown act in a circus ring. What takes the greatest precision is that it’s supposed to sound like total chaos.

There is something really undignified about being taken to your death site crammed in a car like circus clowns. Lord, we need some help here!

Quality of education and employment is like a politician's promise—sounds amazing during the campaign, but once elected, it vanishes into thin air, leaving us with a circus full of clowns juggling our dimes.

but the real shock this past year was finding out how frail has been our illusion of stability all along. We were a shallow country, held together by stale rituals and muscle memory. And now it is a shallow man who will take us wherever he pleases.

Who are we, the people who have ADHD? We are the problem kid who drives his parents crazy by being totally disorganized, unable to follow through on anything, incapable of cleaning up a room, or washing dishes, or performing just about any assigned task; the one who is forever interrupting, making excuses for work not done, and generally functioning far below potential in most areas. We are the kid who gets daily lectures on how we’re squandering our talent, wasting the golden opportunity that our innate ability gives us to do well, and failing to make good use of all that our parents have provided. We are also sometimes the talented executive who keeps falling short due to missed deadlines, forgotten obligations, social faux pas, and blown opportunities. Too often we are the addicts, the misfits, the unemployed, and the criminals who are just one diagnosis and treatment plan away from turning it all around. We are the people Marlon Brando spoke for in the classic 1954 film On the Waterfront when he said, “I coulda been a contender.” So many of us coulda been contenders, and shoulda been for sure. But then, we can also make good. Can we ever! We are the seemingly tuned-out meeting participant who comes out of nowhere to provide the fresh idea that saves the day. Frequently, we are the “underachieving” child whose talent blooms with the right kind of help and finds incredible success after a checkered educational record. We are the contenders and the winners. We are also imaginative and dynamic teachers, preachers, circus clowns, and stand-up comics, Navy SEALs or Army Rangers, inventors, tinkerers, and trend setters. Among us there are self-made millionaires and billionaires; Pulitzer and Nobel prize winners; Academy, Tony, Emmy, and Grammy award winners; topflight trial attorneys, brain surgeons, traders on the commodities exchange, and investment bankers. And we are often entrepreneurs. We are entrepreneurs ourselves, and the great majority of the adult patients we see for ADHD are or aspire to be entrepreneurs too. The owner and operator of an entrepreneurial support company called Strategic Coach, a man named Dan Sullivan (who also has ADHD!), estimates that at least 50 percent of his clients have ADHD as well.

Lots of people feared getting strangled by a terrifying clown. Turns out, choking to death on clown cock wasn’t the worst way to go.

He who performs for praise and applause, is a circus clown. He is but an entertainer. Not an artist.

That’s when I noticed the sledgehammer in her hand. Who just drove around with a sledgehammer in her car? The crazy one that I was for some reason highly attracted to…

At the end of the day, it’s a big circus, a great parade. We’re all in it together, bare-assed in clown suits.

Jacob interrupted my thoughts. “There’s clowns in there.” My gut twisted just a little. I placed my hand on the back of his neck. “Can you see someone inside there?” “No, but clowns live in red tents.” He was at the age where he constantly asked about how the world worked. “At the doctor they give you shots?” “Saws are for cutting boards, but hammers are for nails?” “When I’m five, I will be as tall as you?” His declaration about clowns living in red tents must be a law of the universe that he’d extrapolated from a picture book or Disney Plus cartoon.

Don't blame a clown for acting like a clown. Ask yourself why you keep going to the circus.

There’s a difference between knowing circuses used to have clowns and having a bunch of them beat the hell out of you.

A clown is funny in the circus ring, but what if the same clown appeared at your door at midnight…

In the meantime, though, the race for the Republican Party presidential nomination sure seems funny. The event known around the world as hashtagGOPClownCar is improbable, colossal, spectacular and shocking; epic, monumental, heinous and disgusting. It’s like watching 17 platypuses try to mount the queen of England. You can’t tear your eyes away from it. It

Are we talking about sending the FBI or the National Guard to close abortion clinics?” I asked. “We’ll see when I get to be president,” he answered. Huckabee smiled.

Ultimately, what we’re looking for is someone who’s enough of a morally flexible gasbag to get over with the money people, and then also charming enough on some politically irrelevant level to attract voters. (

Of course, Fiorina’s claim that she had actually seen a video of someone trying to harvest the brain of a fetus with its legs kicking turned out to be false. Her

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

Yes, let's build a wall, but let's do it to help African-Americans! It's alt-right meets Civil Rights! The best crossover hit since "Walk This Way"!

In the span of one hundred and forty seconds I have transformed once again. I spill out of the seat, and to the back of the white beast, the crisp night air filling my lungs…There is plenty of life out here. Hands shoved into my coat pockets, the laughter of a circus clown echoing in the alleyways between tiny houses, the brick apartment buildings, the long warehouses that extend away from me. And already I can feel my hands on his neck.

The irony, of course, is that when America finally wrested control of the political process from the backroom oligarchs, the very first place where we spent our newfound freedom and power was on the campaign of the world’s most unapologetic asshole. It may not seem funny now, because it’s happening to us, but centuries from this moment, people will laugh in wonder. America is ceasing to be a nation, and turning into a giant television show. And this Republican race is our first and most brutal casting call.

By February 2016, when Trump was already steaming toward the nomination, I began to realize the extent to which he’d conned all of us. He first used the media’s financial desperation to secure free coverage, but when the attention became not just negative but condemnatory, he used that, too. He

reduced after that episode to admitting, “I’m

When she was reading she wasn’t the quiet Sullivan twin, she wasn’t the one no one ever noticed. She became a princess in a castle. Or a clown juggling under the circus big top. She explored jungles on elephants’ backs and took trips to Mars on spaceships. Reading took her anywhere she wanted to go. And Sophie found that she wanted to go absolutely everywhere.

We squeezed into the back of the van; it had been a tight fit even before we were lugging a couple of duffel bags of ammo and explosives.  But, like a clown car belonging to a particularly violent circus, we packed in.  The door slammed and Yusuf was flooring the pedal, dragging the van away from the curb and trundling down the street, before more ISIS fighters could show up. I’d call it a good night’s work

Oliver Marley supposed there were more dignified ways to end his life. A lifelong victim to the twin sins of an infertile imagination and pragmatism, the thought of travel simply never crossed his mind.   Had it occurred to him, Oliver could have jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, into the abyss of the Grand Canyon or said au revoir off the Eiffel Tower. But truth be told, Oliver never was much of a traveler. Even locally there were certainly higher quality casinos to choose from, taller parking garages from which to leap. Instead he found himself perched atop the nearest appropriately-sized structure to his home, that being the parking garage of the Circus Time Hotel & Casino. His view not of Alcatraz Island and the rough waters of the San Francisco Bay, nor the breathtaking vistas of the Arizona desert, or the romanticism of the Paris skyline for that matter. Rather he found himself bathed in a noxious blend of pink and green neon, staring into a pair of giant blinking pastel eyes belonging to the eighty-foot clown staring down at him like a frilly guardian angel. Then again, when your primary objective is to pancake yourself on a public sidewalk, perhaps you’re not in the best position to nitpick over the intricacies of what does and does not constitute bad taste. Oliver would just have to live with the clown, at least for another minute or two.

We rejoiced in the idea that reality was not an absolute but a choice, something we select to fit our own conception not of the world but of ourselves. We are Christians, therefore all world events have a Christian explanation. We hate George Bush, therefore Bush is the cause of it all. And

More than any other politician in recent memory, Bernie Sanders is focused on reality. It’s the rest of us who are lost.

The time to start worrying about the consequences of our editorial decisions was before we raised a generation of people who get all of their information from television, and who believe that the solution to every problem is simple enough that you can find it before the 21 minutes of the sitcom are over. Or

As for the rest of them, God help us. Trump’s continued success puts the onus on the field to try to out-crazy the frontrunner.

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski should be herded into a rocket and shot into space for their brown-nosing of Trump A

informationally

But the ineffectiveness of “facts” didn’t stop there. The election of Trump was not just a political choice, a vote against minorities and foreigners, against intellectuals, a cry for better jobs, etc. This was also a metaphysical choice. Sixty million people were announcing that they preferred one reality to another. Inherent in this decision was the revolutionary idea that you can choose your own set of facts. Blue-state America could not wrap its head around this during election season. Facts, they protested, are facts! But Trump voters did not agree. They believed facts were a choice. We had made ours, choosing to ignore certain things, and they would make theirs, doing the same. No amount of “calling Trump out” would change that.

He steps to the lectern and does his Mussolini routine, which he’s perfected over the past months. It’s a nodding wave, a grin, a half-sneer, and a little U.S. Open–style applause back in the direction of the audience, his face the whole time a mask of pure self-satisfaction. “This is unbelievable, unbelievable!” he says, staring out at a crowd of about 4,000 whooping New Englanders with snow hats, fleece and beer guts. There’s a snowstorm outside and cars are flying off the road, but it’s a packed house.

But how can you expect a clown to stop a circus? Bill

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

She feels like a circus clown who wakes up one morning and no longer wants to glue on the red rubber nose.

Q: How is being at a singles bar different from going to the circus? A: At the circus the clowns don't talk.

But his greatest pleasure was the circus. That was something he’d brought with him from childhood. There was never a circus in or outside of El Salvador that he knew about that he didn’t go see. “But aren’t you too busy?” I’d say. “Are you going to be able to take the time?” “You get the tickets, and let’s go!” So we’d go to the circus. When the tightrope walker or the trapeze artist would do their jumps and turns way up in the air, he would get so nervous his hands would sweat. But it was a kind of nervousness he enjoyed. He loved it. And the clowns! The ones with names like “Firuliche” and “Chocolate.” A clown would do a couple of silly tricks, and he would just roar with laughter. I never saw him laugh so hard as he did with the clowns. —Salvador Barraza

Q: How is being at a singles bar different from going to the circus? A: At the circus the clowns don't talk. ***

I believe that all people long to have a consistent friend who loves them, believes in them, and is continually there for them no matter the circumstances. If you’re willing to be that kind of person for others, not only will it expand your people capacity, it will also give you a more satisfying life. You may also be thinking, I can’t do this with everyone, because some people are just difficult. That’s true—for all of us. Debbie Ellis calls such people porcupines in her book How to Hug a Porcupine. When I was a pastor, we called such people EGRs—extra grace required. But we can all use extra grace from time to time. Maybe those who face the greatest challenges are the ones who have difficult people in their families. A friend once told me, “My family is a circus, and every day there is a different clown.” Family life is ground zero in learning how to deal with difficult people. The advice of cartoonist Michael Leunig? “Love one another and you will be happy. It’s as simple and as difficult as that.” It is both difficult and simple. In the end, our goal should be to treat others better than they treat us, to add value to them in a greater capacity than maybe they expect. I love the way Brian Bethune described Nelson Mandela. The South African statesman was a fantastic example of someone with high relational capacity. Bethune

They say, “How are you feeling?” “Like I got gored by a water buffalo shot out of one of those circus cannons they use for clowns. You know the ones?” They smile. “Yeah. I’ve seen them.” “How is that even a job? What do you put on your taxes? ‘Clown gunner’?” Janet laughs a little. “It’s good to see you your own ridiculous self again.

He shrugged. “You won’t find anyone who can make a well-founded accusation against me. What have I done? I’ve grown and sold tobacco; I’ve been a stoker on the Sea of Azov; fisherman on the Black Sea; I’ve traded in bricks and watermelons, going up and down the Dnieper; I’ve been a clown in a circus; I was an actor. Now? I deal in trifles. Indispensable objects—because they’re unnecessary. Men don’t always need bread, but they always need someone to make them marvel. A little paper flower, which opens as if by magic…

Then along came social media, the worst thing of all, the Cretin Unbound. Any moron could shout down Prometheus. The confederacy of dunces could descend like a pack and mock Apollo and Pythagoras. Now I’m putting an end to this circus. The clowns have performed long enough. The joke’s not funny anymore.

She has an abusive husband? Or boyfriend?” “Not according to her. She says she’s single, and I’m not calling her a liar. But the makeup around her eyes? That surely is. She must put it on with a trowel, some days. And the long-sleeve shirts she wears when it’s a hundred degrees plus? They don’t back her position. No, sir. She’s either hooked up with some kind of an asshole or she’s the clumsiest person this side of a circus clown. Now, what can I get for you?

O it does fascinate me so, my new-old-new friend, to compare our lives. Of course I am really not an artist or a writer tho' I am a story-teller. I am a born orator and even now I long & long & long for The Platform as an old circus clown longs—or as we pretend he longs for the Ring! On the platform and there alone I am really myself & in my element & now I have been away from the platform for 20 years!

We are so irritated by the behavior of the new monks that, if we had enough money, we would manage the work with paid people. Those who come don't want spiritual life; it is as if they had come for a job. In many ashramas, there is not much discussion about spirituality at all, and in many places, the ideal of Swamiji is unknown. As a result, ashramas have become social service leagues. Spiritual seekers desirous of liberation have now become workers. Only one who can give up everything can become a monk. Otherwise, he is merely pretending to be a monk, like a clown in the circus. This life is very difficult. It is not like fighting from within a fort but from the middle of an open field.

“Lucie.” He took a shuddering breath, kissed her cheek and stepped back. “I promise you,” he said, “I would have a difficult time stopping there. Which means I am going to now pick up a poker and respectably tend to the fire.” “And if I try to kiss you again, you’ll hit me with the poker?” She smiled. “Not at all. I will do the gentlemanly thing, and hit myself with the poker, and then you can explain the resultant carnage to Malcolm when he returns.” “I don’t think Malcolm is going to want to stay here that much longer.” Lucie sighed, watching the sparks leap up in the grate, dancing motes of gold and red. “He will have to return to London at some point. He is the High Warlock.” “Lucie,” Jesse said softly. He turned to watch the fire for a moment. Its light danced in his eyes. “What is our plan for the future? We will have to go back to the world.” Lucie thought about it. “I suppose if Malcolm throws us out, we can go on the road and be highwaymen. We will only rob the cruel and unjust, of course.” Jesse smiled reluctantly. “Unfortunately, I hear there has been a tragic reduction in the ability of highwaymen to ply their trade due to the increasing popularity of the automobile.” “Then we shall join the circus,” Lucie suggested. “Regrettably, I have a terror of clowns and broad stripes.” “Then we shall hop abroad a steamer bound for Europe,” Lucie said, suddenly quite enthusiastic about the idea, “and become itinerant musicians on the Continent.” “I cannot carry a tune,” Jesse said, “Lucie—

As a former CIA operative, I've heard a lot of statements that have chilled me as though I had a foot-long icicle down my throat while sitting naked and wet on an ice floe. (By the way—don't go to Greenland. Ever.) Things like, Open up! It's the police, and we have a flamethrower! and Tell me the code or I'll have to use this pair of pliers on your eyelids. All terrifying under normal circumstances, but throw in the Iranian secret police or a Venezuelan death squad dressed as circus clowns, and they have a smidge more gravitas. But nothing…nothing compares to what I was just told. "What do you mean we have to sell cookies?" I asked Kelly with a slight tremble in my voice. "To people? On purpose?

Cheese by Maisie Aletha Smikle and Abigail LaTonya Waugh Cheese Cheese Cheese I must get some cheese A rat I must appease And put Micky mouse at ease I need cheese for the steak To shred and bake To make bread and cake While I'm awake Warm cheese is so gooey Heat it longer it melts to oil Floating when it’s boiled Water and oil they just won’t jive When they’re together They are still apart Oil refuses to be absorbed or victimized Frozen cheese is frozen oil hard as ice Grill cheese on toasts Stuff cheese in a roast Cubed cheese on fried rice Tasty and filled with spice While I play ball All I could think of was cheese ball O how I would love to munch On a very big bunch Pizza and cheese went to the circus fair It was indeed a festive affair In the cool breeze Pizza got married to cheese Clown brought the tux and gown On his way into town Pizza and cheese profess their love for each other And swore they'll forever be together Cheese promised pizza never to leave So to cheese, pizza cleave Pizza stuck to cheese like glue And vowed to bond after saying I do

I’ll notify my chain of command, and you can do the same on your end,” he said to Wu. “Between the inevitable media hype, the politics involved, and the department brass demanding answers, this has all the makings of a circus.” “I’m afraid you’re right,” Wu said to Flint. “I just hope we all don’t end up as clowns.

Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy.” She shakes her head, mumbling, “Not my circus, not my monkeys.” She

This world is a circus, and we are the clowns.

I got away… but not before Jake got painted up as a circus clown for the whole school to scoff at.

There's no point in advertising a circus when everybody hates the clown.

I wonder about the gorillas, too. I bet they hate it — feel acute terror and rage — when they wake up covered in something constraining which they cannot possibly understand. Do the game wardens mercifully knock them out again with another tranquilizer dart, and gently remove the disgraceful circus costumes? Or do the gorillas themselves tear the damned weird stuff off their bodies just as soon as they wake? Or do some of them simply wander off, not quite able to cope, like you or me after a bad drunk? In that case, how many tragic gorillas in clown suits might wander the Ugandan jungle this very day?

Quite often fiction is the best reality; cruelties are so much easier to swallow when they’re dressed up and capering about like circus clowns.

Q: What do you think will be the future of your field? There’s too much pessimism about the future for political cartooning. I think the future’s very bright. You see more and more sites like Politico that aggressively deploy cartoons on the homepage. I think the media is becoming increasingly visual… and increasingly made to match our shrinking attention spans. The business model for cartooning is going through a rough transition now, but in the long run the thing we cartoonists do—-deliver simple-minded political messages in short easily digestible bites—-is the direction the media in general is heading. We’re living in a media landscape that seems to get more infantile and politically simple-minded all the time—-look at the huge popularity of Glenn Beck…and I saw someplace recently that Jon Stewart is now the most trusted man in America. The clowns seem to be taking over the circus. This may be bad for governance, but it can only be good news for cartoonists. The interesting part will be what the platforms are going to be, cell phones, iPads, the iChip in my forehead, whatever it is, I’m sure the combination of visual metaphor and incisive humor you find in good cartoons will adapt and evolve and really thrive in the future. (Interview with Washington City Paper)

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.

When their chosen leader is a clown, the performance by those involved, is likely to be part of the circus too.

She’s addle-brained, I tell you . . . a few clowns short of a circus.

Party Hat [10w] Circus clowns, Frenchmen, and sanitation workers look better in party-hats..

I looked like a rainbow had thrown up on a circus clown that exploded after eating a million jelly beans.

So many times I have tried to get my life under control, and to make changes. So many times I have tried to conquer my weight, to be a better husband, to get a better job, to manage my business and finances better, and I have often felt like a juggling circus clown with one too many balls (or chainsaws) spinning in the air. I’m learning that we cannot do everything at once.

Just driving around looking for him is not going to help. We might as well go back and wait on the porch for news as drive around. You're only going to see yards that're neglected and filled with old cars out there. They could kidnap an elephant from the zoo and be dressed like circus clowns with it in the basement and you'd drive past without noticing anything unusual.

Of course, the Kremlin policy is utterly mad. Even with the help of useful fools like Gen. Butler, Moscow’s strategists are bound to fail (in the long run) – especially in Europe; for the natural instincts of sensible people are bound to awaken. However grim the situation may look, however horrific the military disasters to come, the circus clowns will be forced from the stage. Fear of death has a way of focusing the mind, and the threat of enslavement rallies many whose timidity would otherwise be assumed. It does not matter that these people are “late to the party.” As war grows closer, more observers will see the situation for what it is. Shortly before her death last year, a Russian historian wrote to me as follows: “Moscow is performing substantial war preparations. Training both military and civil defense [personnel] including the Moscow Metro, every day; medicine is in full readiness for [the coming] emergency….” J.R.Nyquist

I walked out into the parking lot and found the space he’d written on the rental folder.  I frowned at the bright yellow and black machine that sat there waiting for me.  What is that?  A riding lawnmower?  “This can’t be right,” I said to no one.  I was the only one out there, so I don’t know who I thought I was talking to, but having a thousand conversations in my head over the last twenty-four hours was making me question my own sanity.  Probably talking out loud to myself wasn’t any better, but what the hell … might as well change up the crazy every once in a while to keep it fresh. I pressed the button on the key ring and the headlights flashed on once, proving this was not a mistake.  “A Smart Car?  Are you kidding me?”  It looked like a giant, wasp-yellow roller skate.  Maybe not even a giant one; maybe just a large-ish roller skate.  Surely looking like a giant wasp flying down a country road was a bad idea for a girl with a sting-allergy… I debated in my head whether I should go and argue for one of the other fifty full-sized cars on the lot, but then gave up on the idea five seconds later.  “Screw it,” I said, annoyed as hell.  “Might as well get eight hundred miles to the gallon, right?!”  The tone of my voice had drifted a little over to the hysterical side, but there was nothing I could do about it.  I was barely hanging on, the stress almost enough to send me to the looney bin.  I just kept picturing Bradley saying, “You got married?  To a complete stranger?  In Las Vegas?  When you were drunk?  By a guy named Elvis?”  It was too horrible to fully fathom.  He’d dump me just for humiliating him in front of all his clients and his frat brothers and his parents.  There were so many people expecting me to be the perfect fiancée. I threw my overnight bag in the passenger seat and drove off the lot, wishing I could peel out and really express my anger in a satisfyingly loud and obnoxious way.  But I quickly learned that a Smart Car doesn’t know how to peel out; it’s not equipped to do much with its lawn-mower sized engine.  It just knows how to deliver me from Point A to Point B on a very small amount of gas with almost zero elbow room.  I felt like a clown buzzing around in her little circus car.  The only things missing were a little face paint and some floppy shoes.  At first I thought I was also missing one of those brass honky-horns that clowns carry around, but then I pressed on the steering wheel and found out differently.  Yes, it’s true.  The Smart Car comes equipped with a clown honky-horn.

If you ever see a clown somewhere other than at a circus, rodeo, or party, then either run away or kill it immediately.

Barbara, shut up,” said her son Luker. “You know very well why it’s a private funeral.” “Why?” “Because we are the only people in Mobile who would have come. There’s no point in advertising a circus when everybody hates the clown.

Looking back at Lady Felicia, Anthony politely made his own lips curve upward. It was a thoroughly false and exaggerated smile, and he hoped he didn’t look like a clown in a circus performance. God, how he feared and hated clowns. How pleasant it was to be an adult and to be able to avoid circuses entirely, although in other respects being an adult was overrated.

Jake got painted up as a circus clown

Yes, the girl sneezing pink froth and the woman fisting her eyes each time another oldie crackles from the ceiling look worse than I do. See them. And find, please, a dentist for the man clutching two molars in a bloody paper towel. And a CPA or lawyer - summon one for the man squeezing the folder of gray paper to his chest and squeaking grievously. But I have an appointment. I arrived two hours ago, on time, a little early in fact, and someone must help me find the Ferris wheel I hear looping in my attic and the Tilt-A-Whirl lopsidedly unfolding and refolding in the basement. Through the walls, I hear the oompah-pahing of a carousel, and in dark windows and the gleaming facades of black appliances I glimpse ascending and descending carved horses, real tigers, elephants, and waltzing poodles. Whitewashed clowns ghost across a TV humbling itself before beer, soap, laundry, and my armpits, muffling the human cannonball's applause and the dumbfounded wow when orange torches enter a human face and emerge unquenched. The circus is not my fault or responsibility. Someone must write that down. Someone must sell me a ticket.

That is why I never feel so close to truth, so initiated into its secrets, as on the rare occasions when I go to the theatre or the circus: then I know that I’m finally watching life’s perfect representation. And the actors and actresses, the clowns and magicians, are important and futile things, like the sun and the moon, love and death, the plague, hunger and war among humanity. Everything is theatre. Is it truth I want?

she tried to plump up her paper-thin lips by colouring above and below them in a gaudy red. She was a clown in search of a circus.

What's the difference between a single man and a circus clown? The clown knows when he's wearing funny clothes.

This was David’s circus now, and these were his clowns all the way to the end of the line.

This is what they did with the march on Washington. They joined it. They didn't integrate it; they infiltrated it. They joined it, became a part of it, took it over, And as they took it over, it lost its militancy. They ceased to be angry. They ceased to be hot. They ceased to be uncompromising. Why, it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all. You had one right here in Detroit- I saw it on television- with clowns leading it, white clowns and black clowns. I know you don't like what I'm saying, but I'm going to tell you anyway. 'Cause I can prove what I'm saying. If you think I'm telling you wrong, you bring me Martin Luther King and A. Philip Randolph and James Farmer and those other three, and see if they'll deny it over a microphone. No, it was a sellout. It was a takeover. When James Baldwin came in from Paris, they wouldn't let him talk, 'cause they couldn't make him go by the script. Burt Lancaster read the speech that Baldwin was supposed to make; they wouldn't let Baldwin get up there, 'cause they know Baldwin's liable to say anything. They controlled it so tight- they told those...what time to hit town, how to come, where to stop, what signs to carry, what song to sing, what speech they could make, and what speech they couldn't make; and then told them to get out town by sundown

We’re one clown car away from a full-blown circus.

Mosley’s a clown running a one-man circus,” Sir Andrew said contemptuously. “He’ll be forgotten by Christmas.” “Isn’t that what they said about Hitler?

You think this is a circus? The real clowns are out there on Capitol Hill and over in the White House. Those that wear their neatly pressed suits and sit in their fancy swiveling chairs behind solid oak desks—they think they’re in command of this world. They’re not. They make fools of us all.

The era of the traditional circus has died. People no longer seek the weary magic of clowns in tattered tents. So, the Clown migrated to the Screen, weaving a new kind of sorcery—one whose mechanics remain a terrifying mystery. The digital world offered him a sanctuary far better than the ring: no greedy ringmasters to slash his wages, and no sun to melt the painted mask from his face. But his price is not coin. It is an invitation to a digital carnival hidden within the screens themselves. Once you accept—once you play his game—he drags you into a free circus. There is no fee to enter, but you will give every cent you own, and more, just for a ticket to escape the sheer, suffocating enchantment of that place.