Sideshow Quotes

When I got started, I was a sideshow. At my first Consumer Electronics Show, in 1977 in Chicago, people came from all over the floor to see the 'lady programmer.' They had me dressed in a turquoise lab coat with my name embroidered on the pocket. ~ Brenda Laurel

Note the individual and subjective nature of each case. No two are alike and there is no reason to expect them to be. Each man or woman must find for himself or herself that occupation in which hard work and long hours make him or her happy. Contrariwise, if you are looking for shorter hours and longer vacations and early retirement, you are in the wrong job. Perhaps you need to take up bank robbing. Or geeking in a sideshow. Or even politics. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

The scientific issues that engage people most are the truly fundamental ones: is the universe infinite? Is life just a sideshow in the cosmos? What happened before the Big Bang? Everyone is flummoxed by such questions, so there is, in a sense, no gulf between experts and the rest. ~ Martin Rees

Should you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness - a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest self, which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of a kitchen chair - then this confirmation that you have triumphed again and managed to gull yet another mark, except this time it was the one person you'd hoped might be immune to your ever-creakier, puddle-shallow, sideshow-barker variation on adorable, even though you'd been launching this campaign weekly with a single-minded concentration from day one - well, it conjures up feelings that are best described as mixed, to say the least. ~ David Rakoff

We want small things, tiny joys. The feeling that tomorrow is going to bring us bright colors, shiny tinsel--the delicious smell of cooking, a moment's adventure in a sideshow. We want hope. We want love. And Christ, it shouldn't be too much to ask for in this cockeyed world--and yet it is. Somehow, it is. ~ Lisa Mannetti

If the euro zone doesn't come up with a comprehensive vision of its own future, you'll have a whole range of nationalist, xenophobic and extreme movements increasing across the European Union. And, frankly, questions about the British debate on EU membership will just be a small sideshow compared to the rise of political populism. ~ Nick Clegg

Every day I saw others like me in this city - enough of us to populate our own town. But we only acknowledged each other with a furtive glance, fearful of calling attention to ourselves. Being alone in public was painful enough; two could find themselves smack in the center of an unbearable sideshow. We didn't seem to have any of our own places to gather in community, to immerse ourselves in our own ways and our own languages. ~ Leslie Feinberg

When I first started dating my husband, I had this weird fascination with the circus and clowns and old carnival things and sideshow freaks and all that. About a month after we started dating, he bought me this amazing black-and-white photo book on the circus in the 1930s, and I started sobbing. ~ Christina Hendricks

Then, Valentine's Day came. There was a dance, and balloons and flowers and cheaply made rings and all sorts of lame teddy bears and stuffed animals, as if teenagers can be wooed with the same shit as five-year-olds. It was the Dietzes' most hated holiday of the year, too, because it dealt with the consumerization of something sacred. Mom and Dad had agreed never to buy each other anything on the day. It was a false, Hallmark holiday. A sham. A moneymaking sideshow for insecure couples who didn't have true love. I agreed with this, for the most part. ~ A.S. King

Peter! Were you looking for a horse-shoe?"
"No; I was expecting the horse, but the shoe is a piece of pure, gorgeous luck."
"And observation. I found it."
"You did. And I could kiss you for it. You need not shrink and tremble. I am not going to do it. When I kiss you, it will be an important event
one of those things which stand out among their surroundings like the first time you tasted li-chee. It will not be an unimportant sideshow attached to a detective investigation. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

most accounts of the war, Missouri tends to wink out of existence after the first year, or makes periodic cameos as a sideshow of guerrilla warfare in which the brutality takes center stage rather than the military role of those brutalities within the wider conflict. ~ Mark A. Lause

But just as much as it was a sport, it was a sideshow - a carny act that eventually made it to Broadway. So the next time you hear somebody say, "You know wrestling is fake, right?" you can tell him that yes, you know. That's exactly the point. ~ David Shoemaker

We're not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event. ~ Terence McKenna

I loved county fairs in the South. It was hard to believe that anything could be so consistently cheap and showy and vulgar year after year. each year I thought that at least one class act would force its way into a booth or sideshow, but I was always mistaken. The lure of the fair was the perfect harmony of its joyous decadence, its burned-out dishonored vulgarity, its riot of colors and smells, its jangling, tawdry music, and its wicked glimpse into the outlaw life of hucksters, tattoo parlors, monstrous freaks, and strippers. ~ Pat Conroy

It's amazing that the city we live in allows "pets" that belong in a sideshow, but makes it illegal for me to have a switchblade. ~ Helen Ellis

Were uproariously demanding relief from their intolerable miseries - in this Potemkin sideshow there prevailed a preposterous and mendacious comfort. ~ Stefan Zweig

I'm the first to admit that I don't write right. Now, relax and enjoy the show! The sideshow, that is. ~ Lori R. Lopez

Scientists have always thought that because mammoths roamed such a huge territory - from Western Europe to Central North America - that North American woolly mammoths were a sideshow of no particular significance to the evolution of the species. ~ Hendrik Poinar

Iain MacGregor," she whispered longingly, looking up. The woods were quiet. Strips of moonlight shone through tree limbs that reached like surreal black fingertips across her vision. A single tear slid down her cheek. She touched her mouth, imagining his kiss.
Taking a small pocket knife out of her cargo pants, she looked about. A mystic had once told her that if she left pieces of herself around while she lived, it would expand her haunting territory when she died. Jane wasn't sure she believed in sideshow magic tricks - or the Old Magick as the mystic had spelled it on her sign. She had no idea what had possessed her to talk to the palm reader and ask about ghosts. Still, just in case, she was leaving her stamp all over the woods.
She cut her palm and pressed it to a nearby tree under a branch. Holding the wound to the rough bark stung at first, but then it made her feel better. This forest wouldn't be a bad eternity.
The sound of running feet erupted behind her and she stiffened. No one ever came out here at night. She'd walked the woods hundreds of times. Her mind instantly went to the creepy girl ghosts chanting by the stream.
"Whoohoo!"
Jane whipped around, startled as a streak of naked flesh sprinted past her. The Scottish voice was met with loud cheers from those who followed him. "Water's this way, lads, or my name isn't Raibeart MacGregor, King of the Highlands!"
Another naked man dashed through the forest after him. "It smells of freed ~ Michelle M. Pillow

I am alone in possessing a key to this barbarous sideshow. ~ Arthur Rimbaud

Lucifer's last words in heaven may have been "Non serviam," but none has served the Almighty so dutifully, since His sideshow in the clouds would never draw any customers if it were not for the main attraction of the devil's hell on earth. ~ Thomas Ligotti

Attempted murder. Now honestly what is that? Can you win a Nobel Prize for attempted chemistry? ~ Sideshow Bob

I feel gawky and morbid as somebody in a sideshow. ~ Sylvia Plath

What passed for society was a loud, giddy whirl of thieves and pretentious hustlers, a dull sideshow full of quacks and clowns and philistines with gimp mentalities. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

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

God help us! We have turned the holy fire of God into a circus sideshow - and naive Christians are buying this without realizing that such shenanigans are actually blasphemous.21 ~ John F. MacArthur Jr.

For decades, activist shareholders were an entertaining, but largely ignored, Wall Street sideshow. Disgruntled investors would attend annual meetings to harangue executives, criticize strategies - and protest that their complaints were being ignored. ~ Charles Duhigg

had been like wandering into the wrong carnival sideshow, the kind that left one feeling sick and slightly soiled. ~ John Connolly

Emotional intelligence is what humans are good at and that's not a sideshow. That's the cutting edge of human intelligence. ~ Ray Kurzweil

Circuses are about entertainment and juggling and animals and all that shit. Sideshows are about freaks, about people and the limits of acceptability. We push those limits. If a circus is an escape, Fire said, a sideshow is a confrontation. ~ Chris Abani

Sex is a sideshow in the world of the animal, for the dominant color of that world is fear. ~ Robert Ardrey

Ideas aren't a sideshow that make our factory a little more valuable. Our factory is a sideshow that makes our ideas a little more valuable! ~ Seth Godin

I've never related to the work geek at all-it sounds much more horrible than nerd. Like a freak biting a chicken's head off in a sideshow. ~ Jonathan Lethem

An "exorcism" carried out by these untrained individuals very often becomes a source of misinformation, unecessary pain, a sideshow circus atmosphere. Not to mention the very serious dangers inherent in the actions of such dubious individuals for the victims body and soul. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary that we are able to recognize and find a legitimate exorcist. The first step should always be to ask your parish priest for direction. And as a rule NEVER pay money for such ministry. ~ Jack Ashcraft

The act of staring is a thing which one does not ordinarily do to another human being; it seems to put the object stared at in a class apart. One does not talk to a monkey in a zoo, or to a freak in a sideshow - one only stares. ~ Erving Goffman

Television is god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. We're in the boredom killing business. ~ Paddy Chayefsky

I've no interest in this city. I do not want to live in a curio, Johannes. This is a sideshow! This is something to scare the children! 'The Floating Pirate City'! I don't want it! I don't want to live in this great bobbing parasite, like some fucking pondskater sucking the victims dry. This isn't a city, Johannes; it's a parochial little village less than a mile wide, and I do not want it.

"I was always going to return to New Crobuzon. I would never wish to see out my days outside it. It's dirty and cruel and difficult and dangerous - particularly for me, particularly now - but it's my home. Nowhere else in the world has the culture, the industry, the population, the thaumaturgy, the languages, the art, the books, the politics, the history … New Crobuzon," she said slowly, "is the greatest city in Bas-Lag."

And coming from her, someone without any illusions about New Crobuzon's brutality, or squalor, or repression, the declamation was far more powerful than if it came from any Parliamentarian.

"And you're telling me," she said finally, "that I've been exiled from my city - for life - because of you? ~ China Mieville

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