Carnival Quotes

“A Boat

O beautiful
was the werewolf
in his evil forest.
We took him
to the carnival
and he started
crying
when he saw
the Ferris wheel.
Electric
green and red tears
flowed down
his furry cheeks.
He looked
like a boat
out on the dark
water.”
― Richard Brautigan

“The area was encompassed in a bubble of warm, fragrant steam from the funnel cake deep fryers. It smelled like sweet vanilla cake batter you licked off a spoon.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, The Sugar Queen

“Happiness is simply a temporary condition that proceeds unhappiness. Fortunately for us, it works the other way around as well. But it's all a part of the carnival, isn't it?”
― Federico Fellini

“So the carnival steams by, shakes ANY tree: it rains jackasses.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“That's when I realized the chill wasn't coming from outside—it was coming from within me.”
― Amanda Hocking, Freeks

“A tired man lay down his head
in a dusty room so dim,
and for so long his wife did shake
and yell to waken him.

Meanwhile his thoughts, his dreams, did stir
of sandy, red bullfights,
of powder-blasts in the air
and carnival delights.

Yet still his wife was in despair
in a dusty room so dim,
for she knew death was a whore
not far from tempting him.”
― Roman Payne

“Crazy, crazy kids on a crazy night, a night for pink balloons all over the sky and a candyfruit tree at the end of the street, and he rocked his girl in his arms, sugartight, and he was king of the moon and the streamers and popcorn.”
― Jay Gilbert, The Skinner

“cause we don't hide,
We parade our pride!”
― Ana Claudia Antunes, Pierrot & Columbine

“We came on the wind of the carnival. Eight and a half long years ago, on a wind that seemed to promise so much; a mad wind, full of confetti and scented with smoke and pancakes cooked by the side of the road. The pancake stall is still there, and the crowds that line the side of the street, and the flower-decked cart with its motley crew of fairies, wolves and witches. I bought a galette from that very stall. I bought one now, to remember. Still as good, just the right side of burnt, and the flavors- butter and salt and rye- help reawaken the memory.”
― Joanne Harris, Peaches for Father Francis

“There is that carnival running to celebrate the trip to the star."
"Great. We'll go there."
"You don't know what a carnival is."
"Are you coming with me?"
He hesitated, then nodded.
"Then," she said. "I don't particularly care what it is.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

“Am I not a public nuisance?
During Carnival, maestro, everyone is a public nuisance. The rules are different. Come back and do this again next week. Then maybe we'll arrest you.”
― John Berendt, The City of Falling Angels

“Darkness engulfed me...There was no ground below me, no sky above. Only the black, and the cold.”
― Amanda Hocking, Freeks

“The sun had begun its descent toward the horizon, and the sounds of the carnival played like a familiar song behind me.”
― Amanda Hocking, Freeks

“Something about the crisp, cool air, the twinkling carnival lights, and the scent of deep-fried food provided the perfect atmosphere for reckless teenage abandon.”
― Krystal Sutherland, Our Chemical Hearts

“Bulgakov always loved clowning and agreed with E. T. A. Hoffmann that irony and buffoonery are expressions of ‘the deepest contemplation contemplation of life in all its conditionality’.

It is not by chance that his stage adaptations of the comic masterpieces of Gogol and Cervantes coincided with the writing of The Master and Margarita. Behind such specific ‘influences’ stands the age-old tradition of folk humour with its carnivalized world-view, its reversals and dethronings, its relativizing of worldly absolutes—a tradition that was the subject of a monumental study by Bulgakov’s countryman and contemporary Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, which in its way was as much an explosion of Soviet reality as Bulgakov’s novel, appeared in 1965, a year before The Master and Margarita. The coincidence was not lost on Russian readers. Commenting on it, Bulgakov’s wife noted that, while there had never been any direct link between the two men, they were both responding to the same historical situation from the same cultural basis.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“The world, and we as a part thereof, are the carnival mask on the face of Nonbeing.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“He looked at me then, his deep golden eyes meeting mine, and I saw a heat in them that I felt reflecting in my own.”
― Amanda Hocking, Freeks

“Use high-quality carnival food machines or Equipment to make delicious food for your event or party, We offer you fairy floss, popcorn and chocolate machines for hire in your budget.”
― Smack Amusements

“Get any type of Carnival food equipment like slushie, popcorn, cocktail machines for hire with special discount packages at Smack Amusements an online Australia-based group of company.”
― Smack Amusements

“A ten-year-old Amanda wandering around the sights and sounds of a carnival. Trying to take it all in as such an event was much larger than the backroads of isolated territory from whence she grew up. She could not imagine this many people assembled in one place. It was made more disturbing by the fact none of them seemed familiar. Short for her age, she wandered unnoticed among the crowds and began to feel the first stirrings of fear. The loud talk, the screaming children, the long lines of procession, along with the myriads of odors created a miasma that she wanted to flee. The laughter and the faux expressions of joy on the faces of people, took on the maroon tones of a nightmare. She could imagine underneath the laughter, were horrid screams about to erupt.”
― Jaime Allison Parker, River at the World's Dawn

“Frozen was her heart after he had decided to leave her to live in Venice.

"I will have my own Carnival here then", she said. So she put on her white boots and her coat filled with jewelry, danced on the snow all alone. A wolf saw her magnificent beauty.

He jumped right in front of her. It was not a wolf after all but a gentleman wearing fur. He took her hand and they both slid in a split second. It was too enchanting a dream.

All of a sudden the whole scene became blurry. The blonde woke up with the deep sensation that it all looked too real not to be true!”
― Ana Claudia Antunes, Pierrot & Columbine

“I want to be your Columbine,
And make your dreams mine.”
― Ana Claudia Antunes, Pierrot & Columbine

“The Trinidad Carnival and the calypso are both theatres in and metaphors through which the drama of Trinidad’s social history is encoded and enacted, historically a celebratory mass/mas theatre of contested social space: the domain of the stick fighter, the Wild Indian, the Pierrot Grenade, the Midnight Robber, the chantwel and his descendant, the calypsonian, and the pan man of the emerging steelband movement into the 1960s.”
― Gordon Rohlehr

“A city of carnivals has the most old aged homes.”
― Mantaranjot Mangat, Plotless

“Slushy spiked lemonade/beer
Boiled peanuts/homemade pickles/kettle corn
Mini corn dogs with chili ketchup, curried mustard,
and cheese sauce
Turkey leg confit
Deep-fried Brussels sprouts
Poker-chip potatoes
Ginger-pear sno-cones and cotton candy
Pumpkin funnel cake

"What the hell are poker-chip potatoes?"
"I'm going to slice the potatoes paper thin- like poker chips or carnival tokens- and line them up in a baking dish, accordion-style, with thyme, shallots, and garlic, and bake them until they're crispy around the edges but tender in the middle.”
― Dana Bate, The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs

“Everyone from our group sifted off like puffs of flour getting kneaded into the sticky dough of Colombian Carnaval.”
― Erin Zelinka, On Love and Travel: A Memoir

“On the ferry back from Büyükada

the setting sun’s soft rays
scarcely light the faces
of my fellow weary travellers
sons joke with their fathers
daughters sleep on mothers’ laps
friends play faded playing cards
with an envelope for the missing jack
here a toddler’s hand under his chin
like a scholar there a family roars
with laughter eating sunflower seeds
from a pink plastic bag
we breathe the crisp marmara sea
together suddenly i loved you
despite your carnival of violence
i love you Humanity!
with all your many ifs
and your many thens”
― Kamand Kojouri

“In Extremis by Stewart Stafford

Saturnalia's trumpets sound,
The ancestral chorus song,
Time's gold web drawn back,
For the stocks' denizen throng.

Bawdy knights of the feral feast,
Daze of snoring stranger sloth,
As contagion's banquet guests,
Sipping end times' galling broth.

Bean found in fortuitous cake,
A fool crowned Lord of Misrule,
The meek's pantomimed throne,
A drone in a queen bee's tulle.

Fatted calf, societal scapegoat,
Chattels mopping festive vomit,
Charon coins on bloodshot eyes,
Execution dawn to a dark comet.

© Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“For someone who prefers to keep to himself and doesn't appear to like people all that much, you are everywhere in this carnival.”
― James Irwin, Nina's Friends

“Masquerading as oneself is unbecoming for any carnival.”
― Paulo Ricardo Zargolin