Pageant Quotes

1. "When I watch the living meet,And the moving pageant fileWarm and breathing through the streetWhere I lodge a little while,If the heats of hate and lustIn the house of flesh are strong,Let me mind the house of dustWhere my sojourn shall be long.In the nation that is notNothing stands that stood before;There revenges are forgot,And the hater hates no more;Lovers lying two and twoAsk not whom they sleep beside,And the bridegroom all night throughNever turns him to the bride."
Author: A.E. Housman

2. "The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling."
Author: Albert Einstein

3. "I am so not a pageant girl, but I signed up for the Miss Junior Florida contest because I thought it would be good experience."
Author: Amanda Latona

4. "History is the great dust-heap... a pageant and not a philosophy."
Author: Augustine Birrell

5. "Man's merit lieth in service and virtue and not in the pageantry of wealth and riches."
Author: Bahá'u'lláh

6. "Finally, after a glance at Notre Dame and a brisk trot through the Louvre, we sat down at a cafe on the Place de l'Opera and watched the people. They were amazing -- never had we seen such costumes, such make-up, such wigs; and, strangest of all, the wearers didn't seem in the least conscious of how funny they looked. Many of them even stared at us and smiled, as though we had been the oddities, and not they. Mr. Holmes no doubt found it amusing to see the pageant of prostitution, poverty and fashion reflected in our callow faces and wide-open eyes."
Author: Christopher Isherwood

7. "And Yet the BooksAnd yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,That appeared once, still wetAs shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,And, touched, coddled, began to liveIn spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,Tribes on the march, planets in motion."We are," they said, even as their pagesWere being torn out, or a buzzing flameLicked away their letters. So much more durableThan we are, whose frail warmthCools down with memory, disperses, perishes.I imagine the earth when I am no more:Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights."
Author: Czeslaw Milosz

8. "He'd been given an assignment to write about teen beauty pageants [...], which he'd accepted because he enjoyed blood sports as much as the next person."
Author: David Baldacci

9. ". . . [Nietzsche] had the good manners to despise Christianity, in large part, for what it actually was--above all, for its devotion to an ethics of compassion--rather than allow himself the soothing, self-righteous fantasy that Christianity's history had been nothing but an interminable pageant of violence, tyranny, and sexual neurosis. He may have hated many Christians for their hypocrisy, but he hated Christianity itself principally on account of its enfeebling solicitude for the weak, the outcast, the infirm, and the diseased; and, because he was conscious of the historical contingency of all cultural values, he never deluded himself that humanity could do away with Christian faith while simply retaining Christian morality in some diluted form, such as liberal social conscience or innate human sympathy."
Author: David Bentley Hart

10. "In my mind, she was Lebkuchen Spice—ironic, Germanic, sexy, and off beat. And, mein Gott, the girl could bake a damn fine cookie … to the point that I wanted to answer her What do you want for Christmas? with a simple More cookies, please!But no. She warned me not to be a smart-ass, and while that answer was totally sincere, I was afraid she would think I was joking or,worse, kissing up.It was a hard question, especially if I had to batten down the sarcasm. I mean, there was the beauty pageant answer of world peace, although I'd probably have to render it in the beauty pageant spelling of world peas. I could play the boo-hoo orphan card and wish for my whole family to be together, but that was the last thing I wanted, especially at this late date."
Author: David Levithan

11. "High-pitched squeal like a beauty pageant contestant found best in show, Oprah audience member given a new Chevy, rookie actress surprised with an unlikely Oscar."
Author: Dennis Vickers

12. "Habitats keep evolving new pageants of species, and we shouldn't interfere."
Author: Diane Ackerman

13. "Shortly thereafter, some friends encouraged me to try out for the Miss South Carolina World beauty pageant. To my surprise, I won - and was sent to New York City to compete nationally."
Author: Donna Rice

14. "Unlike we are, unlike, O princely Heart!Unlike our uses and our destinies...Thou, bethink thee, artA guest for queens to social pageantries,With gages from a hundred brighter eyesThan tears even can make mine...What hast though to do With looking from the lattice-lights at me,A poor, tired, wandering singer..."
Author: Elizabeth Barrett Browning

15. "Walmart suddenly smells like a prosti-tot pageant."
Author: Fanny Merkin

16. "If she had anything to say about it, the pageant would be called off and the dignity of Sweet Valley womanhood would be preserved. The truth was, no one seemed to care as much about the beauty pageant issue as she did."
Author: Francine Pascal

17. "The more we are proud that the Bethlehem story is plain enough to be understood by the shepherds, and almost by the sheep, the more do we let ourselves go, in dark and gorgeous imaginative frescoes or pageants about the mystery and majesty of the Three Magian Kings."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

18. "I've begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It's there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, and a lovely day. There's no mystery, no one asks for money, I don't have to dress up, and there's no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to "God" are all answered at about the same 50% rate."
Author: George Carlin

19. "When I create, I feel that I am a participant in the grand pageant of life, a part of the ongoing creative engine of the universe. I don't know if that feeling is enough to replace the solace of religion in the lives of most people, but it is for me."
Author: Greg Graffin

20. "Athletics: it's a wonderful thing, it's a spell-binding thing, nothing in life has quite as much pageantry, as much emotion within a finite time frame, it's incredibly exciting."
Author: H. G. Bissinger

21. "My house completed, and tried and not wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go. The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year."
Author: Henry Beston

22. "War unhinges society, disturbs its peaceful and regular industry, and scatters poisonous seeds of disease and immorality, which continue to germinate and diffuse their baneful influence long after it has ceased. Dazzling by its glitter, pomp and pageantry, it begets a spirit of wild adventure and romantic enterprise, and often disqualifies those who embark in it, after their return from the bloody fields of battle, from engaging in the industrious and peaceful vocations of life."
Author: Henry Clay

23. "It seemed to me that this might be a great pageant, which would give a chance for a very interesting picture."
Author: Henry Ossawa Tanner

24. "I've been in elementary education for years and my belief is that Christmas pageants in schools are little more than conditioning kids for the Christian religion."
Author: Jack Bowman

25. "As a dad, you are Vice President. You are part of the Executive Branch of the family, but you are the partner with the weaker authority. In your children's eyes, you mostly fulfill a ceremonial role of attending pageants and ordering pizza. I'm never the first choice. My kids don't even mask it, which I respect them for. "Let's see, the crabby guy with the scratchy beard or that warm soft lady that tells us stories for eight hours?" It's not even close."
Author: Jim Gaffigan

26. "…So when the last and dreadful hourThis crumbling pageant shall devour,The trumpet shall be heard on high,The dead shall live, the living die,And Music shall untune the sky"
Author: John Dryden

27. "The office of President is a great one; to every true American it seems the greatest on earth. And to me, as I was engaged in weaving a background of music for the pageantry of it, there came a deeper realization of the effect of that office on the man."
Author: John Philip Sousa

28. "Despite myself, I wince.  Everything about her screams "psychopath" – and not the ho-hum, hey-kid-I'm-a-creepy-loner-who's-gonna-chop-you-up-and-eat-you kind that Hollywood adores.  She's the truly effed-up variety.  The hey-bitch-I'm-the-pageant-spawned-nightmare-who's-gonna-make-you-wish-you-were-dead-if-you-even-think-about-running-against-me-for-Prom-Queen type.  And it's got me checking for the nearest exit.Until he steps in."
Author: K.C. King

29. "Modeling and pageants help me overcome feeling insecure about the way that I look and my height."
Author: Katherine Webb

30. "Pageant makeup is so different from your day-to-day look. When you're on stage you really have to pack it on."
Author: Katherine Webb

31. "Rich Little Poor Girl: Alexandra Aldrich grew up being told that she lived in a "child's paradise": a largely deserted, 43-room, 200-year-old house on 420 acres in the Hudson River Valley, complete with woods, animals, interesting outbuildings and bohemian tenants who made giant puppets and staged elaborate pageants. The story it tells is so extraordinary, and Aldrich's tone is so baldly honest, that the reader's attention will not flag."
Author: Laura Miller For Salon

32. "A huge cloud of dust is not a beautiful thing to look at. Very few painters have done portraits of huge clouds of dust or included them in their landscapes or still lifes. Film directors rarely choose huge clouds of dust to play the lead roles in romantic comedies, and as far as my research has shown, a huge cloud of dust has never placed higher than twenty-fifth in a beauty pageant. Nevertheless, as the Baudelaire orphans stumbled around the cell, dropped each half of the battering ram and listening to the sound of crows flying in circles outside, they stared at the huge cloud of dust as if it were a thing of great beauty."
Author: Lemony Snicket

33. "Back in the day after I won my first pageant there was an agency that was getting me work on the side."
Author: Maria Menounos

34. "Schoolboy days are no happier than the days of afterlife, but we look back upon them regretfully because we have forgotten our punishments at school and how we grieved when our marbles were lost and our kites destroyed – because we have forgotten all the sorrows and privations of the canonized ethic and remember only its orchard robberies, its wooden-sword pageants, and its fishing holidays."
Author: Mark Twain

35. "I did one pageant in sixth grade, and I loved it! I loved the dresses and the big hair."
Author: Molly Quinn

36. "What's the biggest problem facing teenagers today? Ourselves. We're a generation of lazy underachievers who need to learn that hard work pays off. What's your town known for? Cow manure! Hold for laughs... Actually Irondale is the setting of Fannie Flagg's famous novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café. Why'd you enter the Junior Miss Birmingham pageant? To win... to go to State... then Nationals... maybe get the hell out of Alabama."
Author: Nadria Tucker

37. "It was this little troublemaker named Ralph Waldo Duffy. Ralph Waldo is the one who really ruined the pageant. He picked up the baby Jesus by the feet, and your mother stood up in front of God and everybody and yelled, 'Joseph, put Jesus down before I smack you.' Even then she had the makings of a good mother."
Author: Pamela Todd

38. "And others came... Desires and Adorations, Winged Persuasions and veil'd Destinies, Splendours, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies; And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs, And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam Of her own dying smile instead of eyes, Came in slow pomp; the moving pomp might seemLike pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream."
Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley

39. "The dead," he had said once, "need nothing from the living, and the living can give nothing to the dead." At twenty-two, it had sounded precocious; at thirty-four, it sounded mature, and this pleased Michael very much. He had liked being mature and reasonable. He disliked ritual and pomposity, routine and false emotion, rhetoric and sweeping gestures. Crowds made him nervous. Pageantry offended him. Essentially a romantic, he had put away the trappings of romance, although he had loved them deeply and never known."
Author: Peter S. Beagle

40. "What do you want ?"It was a hard question, especially if I had to bat en down the sarcasm. I mean, there was the beauty pageant answer of world peace, although I'd probably have to render it in the beauty pageant spelling of world peas."
Author: Rachel Cohn

41. "Certain things are expected of you when you're a demon. Take the grotesque bodies, for example. Powerful, lethal, but definitely not beauty pageant material. Which is why the more talented among the demon race normally reverted to a basic human form. Those that couldn't take human form were destined to a life of servitude or as a meal on legs."
Author: Samantha Blake

42. "It's an absolute honor to be taking part in the pageant for the Diamond Jubilee. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and will be a moment in history that will always be remembered. I'm really looking forward to being out on the river with friends and family. To mark this historic moment will be extremely special."
Author: Steve McFadden

43. "Kay Cannon was a woman I'd known from the Chicago improv world. A beautiful, strong midwestern gal who had played lots of sports and run track in college, Kay had submitted a good writing sample, but I was more impressed by her athlete's approach to the world. She has a can-do attitude, a willingness to learn through practice, and she was comfortable being coached. Her success at the show is a testament to why all parents should make their daughters pursue team sports instead of pageants. Not that Kay couldn't win a beauty pageant - she could, as long as for the talent competition she could sing a karaoke version of ‘Redneck Woman' while shooting a Nerf rifle."
Author: Tina Fey

44. "Finally, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of November 1863 as Thanksgiving: a day to solemnly acknowledge the sacrifices made for the Union....Shopping was part of the American Dream, too. So in 1939, at the urging of merchants, FDR moved Thanksgiving ahead a week, to lengthen the Christmas shopping season. And there it has remained, a day of national gluttony, retail pageantry, TV football, and remembrance of the Pilgrims, a folk so austere that they regarded Christmas as a corrupt Papist holiday."
Author: Tony Horwitz

45. "[The Edwardian era] was a time of booming trade, of great prosperity and wealth in which the pageant of London Society took place year after year in a setting of traditional dignity and beauty. The great houses—Devonshire, Dorchester, Grosvenor, Stafford and Lansdowne House—had not yet been converted into museums, hotels and flats, and there we danced through the long summer nights till dawn. The great country-houses still flourished in their glory, and on their lawns in the green shade of trees the art of human intercourse was exquisitely practised by men and women not yet enslaved by household cares and chores who still had time to read, to talk, to listen and to think."
Author: Violet Bonham Carter

46. "The battered woman--for she wore a skirt--with her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love--love which has lasted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of years ago, her lover, who had been dead these centuries, had walked, she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone; death's enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her side a bunch of purple heather, there on her high burial place which the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the pageant of the universe would be over."
Author: Virginia Woolf

47. "But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness."
Author: Virginia Woolf

48. "In all things I saw the passion of life for growth and greatness, the drama of everlasting creation. I came to think of myself, not as a dance and chaos of molecules, but as a brief and minute portion of that majestic process... I became almost reconciled to mortality, knowing that my spirit would survive me enshrined in a fairer mold... and that my little worth would somehow be preserved in the heritage of men. In a measure the Great Sadness was lifted from me, and, where I had seen omnipresent death, I saw now everywhere the pageant and triumph of life."
Author: Will Durant

49. "The glorious transmutation of autumn had come on: all the vast Canadian shores were clothed with a splendour never seen in France; to which all the pageants of all the kings were as a taper to the sun."
Author: Willa Cather

50. "Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish,A vapor sometime like a bear or lion,A towered citadel, a pendant rock,A forked mountain, or blue promontoryWith trees upon't that nod unto the worldAnd mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen thesesigns:They are black vesper's pageants."
Author: William Shakespeare

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