Quotes & Sayings About Circus Elephants

Souls dance undressed/ together/ and like loiterers/ on the fringes of a fair/ we ogle the unobtainable/ imagined mystery/ Yet away around on the far side/ like a stage door of a circus tent/ is a wide vent in the battlements/ where even elephants/ waltz thru
pg. 31// A Coney Island of the Mind — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Now the freaks are on television, the freaks are in the movies. And it's no longer the sideshow, it's the whole show. The colorful circus and the clowns and the elephants, for all intents and purposes, are gone, and we're dealing only with the freaks. — Jonathan Winters

Several days later he'd worked his way back to the late 1800s. The entire history of Wall Street was the story of scandals, it now seemed to him, linked together tail to trunk like circus elephants. — Michael Lewis

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. — Jennifer E. Smith

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 — Mike Doughty

I hate to witness animals in captivity - or see circus elephants paraded down the streets. When animals are caged, it's a loss of what they are. — K.A. Applegate

Toys to deftly pluck up like animal crackers and deposit safely into a crate decorated with friezes of bright circus trains carrying aardvarks, dodos, swift dromedaries, baby elephants, and plastic dinosaurs. A box of mixed metaphors. — Patti Smith

We came here for a small, informal meeting. We find you've turned it into a circus. Well, if you're going to have a circus, you've got to have elephants. — Robert A. Heinlein

We have to be aggressive when those we stick up for have no voice. I don't consider it radical to say cruelty is wrong and that animals should be respected. I consider it radical to eat corpses, put electrodes in animals' heads, make elephants live in chains in the circus, and poison animals we consider a nuisance. — Ingrid Newkirk

Well, I bought a ticket to the circus. I don't know why I was surprised to see elephants. — Norris Church Mailer

When I say that she was the greatest,
I mean that she resembled a circus.

She was not brightly colored,
nor was she composed

of three rings, but
under a tent in the middle of

a starlit field
on a summer night,

you could see her
in just a t-shirt

and forget how unhappy
the elephants were. — Rob MacDonald

Recently I stood in the desert, far out side of L. A., and watched the sun set on a circus tent from 1930. Every where stood animals: elephants, tigers that should be loaded into a steam train. 300 extras in costumes raced around, the modern world had disappeared totally. Although that was totally fake, it still happened directly before my eyes! That was my perfect day. I would be gladly experience that every day. It happens continually to me: It calls itself work. That is wonderful and more than enough. — Robert Pattinson

Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants. — Neil Gaiman

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

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

We have all seen these circus elephants complete with tusks, ivory in their head and thick skins, who move around the circus ring and grab the tail of the elephant ahead of them. — John F. Kennedy

When children see animals in a circus, they learn that animals exist for our amusement. Quite apart from the cruelty involved in training and confining these animals, the whole idea that we should enjoy the humiliating spectacle of an elephant or lion made to perform circus tricks shows a lack of respect for the animals as individuals. — Peter Singer

His lap looked like it was already occupied
by a giant boner. It pressed against his pants like a circus tent pole. Elephants could fit under there. A lion tamer and some flying trapeze artists. A dancing bear, or five. — Juniper Bell

OK, the rule is, you can [make love to] an elephant if you want to, but if you do you can't cover the circus. — A. M. Rosenthal

I am further back, surrounded on all sides by wailing men, their faces shiny with tears. Uncle Al promised three dollars and a bottle of Canadian whiskey to the man who puts on the best show. You've never seen such grief
even the dogs were howling. — Sara Gruen

I love Israel, I go back all the time. I just love New York a little more. My workers are Arabs, my best friend is a black man from Alabama, my girlfriend's a Puerto Rican, and my landlord is a half-Jew bastard. You know what I did this morning? I read in the paper yesterday that the circus is setting up in the Madison Square Garden, they said the elephants would be walking through the Holland Tunnel at dawn. I'm a photographer a little too, you know? So I get up at five o'clock, bike over to the tunnel, and wait. It turns out the paper got it wrong, they came through the Lincoln, but still, you know? This is a hell of a place. — Richard Price

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

And then I laugh, because it's so ridiculous and so gorgeous and it's all I an do to not melt into a fit of giggles. So what if I'm ninety-three? So what if I'm ancient and cranky and my body's a wreck? If they're willing to accept me and my guilty conscience, why the hell shouldn't I run away with the circus?
It's like Charlie told the cop. For this old man, this IS home. — Sara Gruen

May giant circus elephants shit on your lawn. May bug-eyed gargoyles eat your young. — James Ellroy

We came here for a quiet, small, informal meeting - strictly business. We find you've turned it into a circus. Well, if you're going to have a circus, you've got to have elephants and there's no two ways about it. — Robert A. Heinlein