Quotes & Sayings About Revelry

And pomp, and feast, and revelry,
With mask, and antique pageantry,
Such sights as youthful poets dream
On summer eves by haunted stream. — John Milton

It did not take Bunch very long, amid the politicking and the revelry, to discover the darker side of life in Charleston's homes. "The frightful atrocities of slaveholding must be seen to be described," he wrote in a private letter that wound up prominently positioned in the official slave-trade correspondence of the Foreign Office. "My next-door neighbor, a lawyer of the first distinction and a member of the Southern Aristocracy, told me himself that he flogged all his own people - men and women - when they misbehaved. I hear also that he makes them strip, and after telling them that they were to consider it as a great condescension on his part to touch them, gives them a certain number of lashes with a cow-hide. The frightful evil of the system is that it debases the whole tone of society - for the people talk calmly of horrors which would not be mentioned in civilized society. It is literally no more to kill a slave than to shoot a dog. — Christopher Dickey

I remember the noise of the bells ringing at school as the effigy of Guy Fawkes we'd prepared earlier was carried out on a canvas stretcher, hoisted on to the huge bonfire and set alight. Then the revelry would begin. My school friends and I would all have sparklers we passed around, lighting one from another. — Pippa Middleton

He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

ADA Cher Reo was sleeping off a night of drunken revelry like the rest of them, so that would be handy. — J.D. Robb

Piazza del Popolo presented a spectacle of gay and noisy mirth and revelry. A crowd of masks flowed in from all sides, emerging from the doors, descending from the windows. From every street and every corner drove carriages filled with clowns, harlequins, dominoes, mummers, pantomimists, Transteverins, knights, and peasants, screaming, fighting, gesticulating, throwing eggs filled with flour, confetti, nosegays, attacking, with their sarcasms and their missiles, friends — Alexandre Dumas

We devote the activity of our youth to revelry and the decrepitude of our old age to repentance: and we finish the farce by bequeathing our dead bodies to the chancel, which when living, we interdicted from the church. — Charles Caleb Colton

You who are dead ... tonight you will disport yourselves for my pleasure. Food and wine will pass between your dead lips, though you will not taste it. Your dead stomachs will hold it within you, while your dead feet take the measure of a dance. Your dead mouths will speak words that will have no meaning to you, and you will embrace one another without pleasure. You will sing for me if I wish it. You will lie down again when I will it ... Let the revelry begin. — Roger Zelazny

As the people of Ein Hod were marched into despossession, Moshe and his comrades guarded and looted the newly emptied village. While Dalia lay heartbroken, delirious with the loss of Ismael, Jolanta rocked David to sleep. While Hasan tended to his family's survival, Moshe sang in drunken revelry with his fellow soldiers. And while Yehya and the others moved in anguished steps away from their land, the usurpers sand "Hatikva," and shouted, "Long live Israel! — Susan Abulhawa

Though no participator in the joy of more vehement sport, I have a pleasure that I cannot reconcile to my abstract notions of the tenderness due to dumb creatures in the tranquil cruelty of angling. I can only palliate the wanton destructiveness of my amusement by trying to assure myself that my pleasure does not spring from the success of the treachery I practise toward a poor little fish, but rather from that innocent revelry in the luxuriance of summer life which only anglers enjoy to the utmost. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

There was a sound of revelry by night, And Belgium's capital had gathered then Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright The lamps shone o'er fair women and brave men. A thousand hearts beat happily; and when Music arose with its voluptuous swell, Soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again, And all went merry as a marriage bell. But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell! — Lord Byron

You will never get a satisfactory answer, no matter how much effort or reason you expend, to these types of questions. You probably can't even hope to acquire even mildly strong evidence either way. You will never know, beyond doubt, in advance, what is going to happen to you when you die. Never! And really why should you care? Why do you give a rat's ass? You're five years old. Don't worry about what happens when you die, worry about what happens when you live for crying out loud! Christ, if I was your age, I'd be out living it up, hitting on chicks, getting drunk, c'mon. You with me kid? — Sergio De La Pava

One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic thinned; motor cars, tinkling, darting, succeeded the lumber of vans; and here and there among the thick foliage of the squares an intense light hung. I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning. I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry. — Virginia Woolf

No matter how many times we read "King Lear," never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds ... — Vladimir Nabokov

The realization of our soul has its moral and its spiritual side. The moral side represents training of unselfishness, control of desire; the spiritual side represents sympathy and love. They should be taken together and never separated. The cultivation of the merely moral side of our nature leads us to the dark region of narrowness and hardness of heart, to the intolerant arrogance of goodness; and the cultivation of the merely spiritual side of our nature leads us to a still darker region of revelry in intemperance of imagination. — Rabindranath Tagore

Midnight shout and revelry, Tipsy dance and jollity. — John Milton

Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving ... The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. — David Foster Wallace

Reflection is a flower of the mind, giving out wholesome fragrance; but revelry is the same flower, when rank and running to seed. — Desiderius Erasmus

Why is it that a convict never saves his money? Well, not only is it difficult for him to keep it, but prison life is so miserable that a man, of his very nature, thirsts for freedom of action. His position in society makes him so irregular a being that the idea of swallowing up his capital in orgies, of intoxicating himself with revelry, seems to him quite natural if only he can procure himself one moment's forgetfulness. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

he remained enthralled by the sublimely ordered Ptolemaic cosmos in which 'we do not see, like Meredith's Lucifer, the army of unalterable law but rather the revelry of insatiable love.' He conceded that it was not 'true'; but in his last, perhaps his most provocative, pages, claimed that all 'models' of the universe reflect as much the psychology of an age as the current state of knowledge. — Jocelyn Gibb

A survivor, in another sense, was left alive. The king's nephew, Stephen, count of Blois, was suffering from a severe bout of diarrhoea and declined to join the revelry aboard the White Ship. Since he would be crowned as king of England fifteen years later, it can plausibly be maintained that an attack of diarrhoea determined the fate of the nation. Statesmen may plot and plan. Learned men may calculate and conclude. Diplomats may debate and prevaricate. But chance rules the immediate affairs of humankind. — Peter Ackroyd

Christmas was close at hand, in all his bluff and hearty honesty; it was the season of hospitality, merriment, and open-heartedness; the old year was preparing, like an ancient philosopher, to call his friends around him, and amidst the sound of feasting and revelry to pass gently and calmly away. — Charles Dickens

Conscience, that vicegerent of God in the human heart, whose "still small voice" the loudest revelry cannot drown. — William Henry Harrison

My songs are all about celebrating poignant music. While some of them focus on fun and revelry, they are fortunately backed by powerful lyrics. Put together, the lyrics, tune and my voice strive to take the songs to the next level. — Kailash Kher

Both looked back then on the wild revelry ... and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

There is more healing joy in five minutes of true worship than in five nights of revelry. — Aiden Wilson Tozer

Up again to the crest, and still no sight of land. Something that looked like clouds - or could it be ships? - far away on his left. Then, down, down, down - he thought he would never reach the end of it . . . this time he noticed how dim the light was. Such tepid revelry in water - such glorious bathing, as one would have called it on earth, suggested as its natural accompaniment a blazing sun. But here there was no such thing. The water gleamed, the sky burned with gold, but all was rich and dim, and his eyes fed upon it undazzled and unaching. The very names of green and gold, which he used perforce in describing the scene, are too harsh for the tenderness, the muted iridescence, of that warm, maternal, delicately gorgeous world. It was mild to look upon as evening, warm like summer noon, gentle and winning like early dawn. It was altogether pleasurable. He sighed. — C.S. Lewis

My job as the director is to make that as authentic as I can and not to disturb the revelry. — Scott Hicks

The baseball establishment is permissive about revelry. — Curt Flood

There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness, revelry, high life. — Arthur Schopenhauer

O thou beautiful And unimaginable ether! and Ye multiplying masses of increased And still increasing lights! what are ye? what Is this blue wilderness of interminable Air, where ye roll along, as I have seen The leaves along the limpid streams of Eden? Is your course measur'd for ye? Or do ye Sweep on in your unbounded revelry Through an aerial universe of endless Expansion,
at which my soul aches to think,
Intoxicated with eternity. — Lord Byron

JOHNNY: Friends! Outcasts. Leeches. Undesirables. A blessing on you, and upon this beggars' banquet. This day we draw a line in the chalk, and push back against the bastard pitiless busybody council, and drive them from this place for ever. I, Rooster Byron, your merciless ruler, have decreed that today all my bounty is bestowed upon you, gratis. There will be free booze, bangers, draw, whizz and whatnot, for all the minions of my kingdom. — Jez Butterworth

In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and the revelry above may cause us to forget their existence ... — Nathaniel Hawthorne

One story sums up their magical quality. On June 30th 1968, at the height of Apple optimism, Paul McCartney and Derek Taylor were driving back to London from Saltaire, Yorkshire, where they had been recording the Black Dyke Mills Band on a song of Paul's called 'Thingummybob'. They were in Bedfordshire. Let's pick a village on the map and pay it a visit, said Beatle Paul. He found a village called Harrold, which they found quite hilarious, and turned off the A5. Harrold turned out to be a picture-perfect village, with a picture-perfect pub at its heart. The pub was closed, but when the villagers saw there was a Beatle at the door they opened it up. Soon the whole village was in the pub, listening to Paul McCartney on the pub piano playing the as-yet-unreleased 'Hey Jude'. Every Harrold resident danced and sang along, and the revelry went on until 3 a.m. It was beautiful, perfect, spontaneous and full of love. Harrold. You couldn't make it up. — Bob Stanley

After seeing the various fantastic sights, a visitor to Panorama Island would have had to gasp in amazement at this unsurpassable view. He would have had the impression that the entire island was a rose floating on the vast ocean and that the giant scarlet flower of an opium dream was conversing on an equal footing with the sun in the sky, just the two of them. What kind of strange beauty had that incomparable simplicity and grandeur created? Some travelers might have recalled the world of myth that their distant ancestors had seen. . . .

How can the author describe the madness and debauchery, the pleasures of revelry and drunkenness, the numberless games of life and death that were played day and night on that magnificent stage? You readers might find something that resembled it, in part, in your most fantastic, bloodiest, and most beautiful nightmares. — Rampo Edogawa

Huge knots of sea-weed hung upon the jagged and pointed stones, trembling in every breath of wind; and the green ivy clung mournfully round the dark and ruined battlements. Behind it rose the ancient castle, its towers roofless, and its massive walls crumbling away, but telling us proudly of its own might and strength, as when, seven hundred years ago, it rang with the clash of arms, or resounded with the noise of feasting and revelry. — Charles Dickens

There are those to whom a sense of religion has come in storm and tempest; there are those whom it has summoned amid scenes of revelry and idle vanity; there are those, too, who have heard its "still small voice" amid rural leisure and placid retirement. But perhaps the knowledge which causeth not to err is most frequently impressed upon the mind during the season of affliction. — Walter Scott

With Thy wine-cup waving high, With Thy maddening revelry, To Eleusis' flowery vale, Contest Thou - Bacchus, Paean, hail! — Anonymous

It takes a while for revelry to turn to reverence, and much repetition of truth to eventual turn young zeal into habitual channels for good. — Elisabeth Elliot

There is a remembrance of the dead, to which we turn even from the charms of the living. These we would not exchange for the song of pleasure or the bursts of revelry. — Washington Irving

Thus it was, that when the little hairy man arrived back from the village of Revelry (although why it was so called no man alive could say, for it was a gloomy, somber place, and had been for time out of mind) he found Tristran sitting glumly beside a hawthorn bush, wrapped in a blanket, and bewailing the loss of his hat. "They said cruel things about my true love," said Tristran. "Miss Victoria Forester. How dare they?" "The little folk dare anything," said his friend. "And they talks a lot of nonsense. But they talks an awful lot of sense, as well. You listen to 'em at your peril, and you ignore 'em at your peril, too. — Neil Gaiman