Festivity Quotes

“This is a day of celebration!
Today, we are divorcing the past
and marrying the present.
Dance,
and you will find God
in every room.
Today, we are divorcing resentment
and marrying forgiveness.
Sing,
and God will find you
in every tune.
Today, we are divorcing indifference
and marrying love.
Drink, and play that tambourine
against your thighs.
We have so much celebrating to do!”
― Kamand Kojouri

“Then there was the concert where the boys refused to sing 'God Save the King' because of the pudding they had had for luncheon. One way and another, I have been consistently unfortunate in my efforts at festivity. And yet I look forward to each new fiasco with the utmost relish.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall

“The 10 ever greatest misplacements in life:

1. Leadership without character.
2. Followership without servant-being.
3. Brotherhood without integrity.
4. Affluence without wisdom.
5. Authority without conscience.
6. Relationship without faithfullness.
7. Festivals without peace.
8. Repeated failure without change.
9. Good wealth without good health.
10. Love without a lover.”
― Israelmore Ayivor

“The festivity had reached that apogee of joy when you face the happy fate of being crushed to death.”
― Émile Zola, The Attack on the Mill and Other Stories

“The icicles wreathing
On trees in festoon
Swing, swayed to our breathing:
They’re made of the moon.”
― Elinor Wylie

“Folks had draped strange flags over their iron porticoes with drawings of pineapples and the word WELCOME. The South was like that, festive but impenetrable.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Lake Success

“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

“उत्सव

तुम क्या कभी श्मशान गई हो अवंतिका? क्या बताऊँ तुम्हें!
ओह वह कैसा उत्सव है, कैसा आनंद, न देखो तो समझ नहीं पाओगी—
पंचांग में नहीं ढूँढ़ पाओगी ऐसा उत्सव है यह
कॉफ़ी के घूँट लेता हूँ
अग्नि को घेर जींस-धोती-पतलून-बनियान व्यस्त हैं अविराम
मद्धिम अग्नि कर रही है तेज नृत्य आनंदित होकर, धुएँ का वाद्य-यंत्र
सुन कर जो लोग अश्रुपूरित आँखों से शामिल होने आए हैं उनकी भी मौज़
अंततः शेयर बाज़ार में क्या चढ़ा क्या गिरा, फिर टैक्सी
पकड़ सामान्य निरामिष ख़रीददारी पुरोहित की दी हुई सूची अनुसार—
चलना श्मशान काँधे पर सबसे सस्ते पलंग पर सोकर लिपस्टिक लगाकर
ले जाएँगे एक दिन सभी प्रेमी मिल काँधे के ऊपर डार्लिंग…”
― Malay Roychoudhury, Selected Poems

“If the festivities at Christmas and the New Year take the form of an in creasingly conventional hullabaloo - since we no longer have the winter solstice as our excuse in the electronic age, nor, in the age of Jesus Christ Superstar, that of the Nativity, nor even that of the snow and ice isolating each person in their own inner space and numbing the blood in the veins - if the end-of-year revels make people so anxious, it is because they are taking the measure of the twelve months that are to come, which they will slowly have to plough through one by one. It is the same with time today as it is with having a child: it is too long in the carrying, too long agrowing. We would like to have the chance to enjoy it right away, to have the fast-forwarded projection of the next century. Think how impatient we are for the year 2000, this whole millennium to get through, while we are already madly curious about the year 2020 and, no doubt, perfectly disenchanted as to what awaits us in '86. The celebrations of the millennium really are going to have to be brilliant to overcome the boredom we feel when we think of the next century.

If only we could at least know that there were merely one or two hundred years to go, that would make things more interesting. There is nothing like a catastrophe to usher in a millennium. They regenerate time in the same way as a cloudburst regenerates low water reserves. Yet it is time, real time, we are going to be short of. If the year 2000 does not happen, it will be because time will simply have disappeared, as winter has in some latitudes. But this is a dream. I fear that we won't have sufficient reserves to get to this point, and that the year 2000 will disappoint us as the year 1000 did by not bringing with it the end of the world.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories