Aňa’s Reviews > Nights at the Circus > Status Update

When she dropped her wrap and donned her plumed topknot, it was as though a huge, not altogether friendly bird appeared among them. She cast a glance at the opulence reflected in the mirror, admired her own bosoms. In the auditorium, they demanded her. She cocked an ear.
‘Suckers,’ she said.

(…) concerned only to give the illusion of intentional Bedlam, for the show must go on. And, even if Buffo at last had contrived to plunge his carving knife into the viscera of the Human Chicken, nobody in that vast gathering of merry folk would ever have been permitted to believe it was real manslaughter; it would have seemed, instead, the cream of the jest.

She owes it to herself to remain a woman, he thought. It is her human duty. As a symbolic woman, she has a meaning, as an anomaly, none.
As an anomaly, she would become again, as she once had been, an exhibit in a museum of curiosities. But what would she become, if she continued to be a woman?

It is a phenomenon of the trapeze that its practitioners always look larger upon it than they are in life.

In all this, Mignon assumed a woman’s place — that of the cause of discord between men; how else, to these men, could she play any real part in their lives?

She had an exceedingly short memory, which alone saved her from desolation.

(…) and champagne in a silver ice-bucket, deliriously misted with chill.

From beggar to thief is one step, but a step in two directions at the same time, for what a beggar loses in morality when he becomes a thief he regains in self-respect.

'Sometimes it seems,' said Grok, 'that the faces exist of themselves, in a disembodied somewhere, waiting for the clown who will wear them, who will bring them to life. Faces that wait in the mirrors of unknown dressing-rooms, unseen in the depths of the glass like fish in dusty pools (…)

The child’s laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown. (—Buffo the Great)