Collective Euphoria Quotes

The whispers of shared ecstasy are choral.

The energy of the crowd is insane. Twenty thousand people. It's the biggest jolt of adrenaline. It's very hard to explain. You know the old story about the woman lifting the car off her kid? It's in that realm. You can actually hurt yourself and not know it.

There is something transformative if you're a black person cheering in a theater and turn to see a white person cheering for the same thing you are.

There was never anything like it before in history. It was a different kind of joyous, happy screaming.

The urge to transform one's appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress." --Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets, 260.

At festivals, you can go a lot bigger than a club and have massive euphoric moments because there are so many people there all feeling the same thing.

I think escape is sort of like coming to a show with ten thousand other people and responding to that moment. Sharing that moment - that's escape.

Live music is incredible because you get to be with people, and you get to have this tactile, real-world experience, but at the end of the day, if your eyes are closed and you're getting swept away, it's like... I don't know.

It's amazing - you know, you just look up, and you say, 'Wow, that's amazing.' It's 25,000 people only on one side, so of course you enjoy it. Every time when you go on the pitch, it's just crazy. They know when we need some energy; they have a button, so it's perfect. But you feel it; you feel it, of course.

The joy of a party is the newness of people to each other, renewed strikingness of humanity. They love each other, to distraction. Really to distraction. Before they fall into conversation and separate. ... The strangeness, and the hopes aroused by strangeness, are illusions. Mirages arising wherever people gather expectantly together.

I love that sense of release as you throw yourself into the crowd as hundreds of arms are carrying you.

I've always loved listening to music on my own, but there's another side of me that is just fascinated by... like Goa trance, for example - just a rave on a beach in India, you know? Where there's someone that's spinning the music, and it's just this free-flowing, continuous energy.

I watched Italia '90 with my Mum and Dad and my brother, you know, leaping around the house when the penalties were on... It would be great to be part of that, to have that kind of impact.

The thing of sitting in an audience and going into a dream-like state with several hundred other people that are sharing exactly what you're feeling is a profound event.

Solitary pursuits like playing video games and skateboarding can't compete with the thrill of mobbing a teammate as he scores the winning run - nor do they end with a postgame trip to Dairy Queen.

Any kind of political campaign that taps the kind of energy that nothing else can reach would generate a tremendous high for everybody involved in it.

...As every one of us knows, there are some festivals and games in which everything goes right, and every element lifts up, animates, and exalts every other, just as there are theatrical and musical performances which without any clearly discernible cause seem to ascend miraculously to glorious climaxes and intensely felt experiences, whereas others, just as well prepared, remain no more than decent tries.

When you're on stage and the stars are aligned and the audience is as one and you're guiding them, steering them... It's a feeling of incredible potency, of unity, of such, such joy. It's almost overwhelming to know that you're making that number of people feel better.

Most Americans ... have a sort of permanent intoxication from within, a sort of invisible champagne.

People who have lived through a war know that as it approaches, an at first secret, unacknowledged, elation begins, as if an almost inaudible drum is beating ... an awful, illicit, violent excitement is abroad. Then the elation becomes too strong to be ignored or overlooked: then everyone is possessed by it.

There was a euphoria in the music and the way it was delivered, and, as the crowds started to get bigger, it fed off itself until it became less about the band and more about being with all those people, jumping up and down, drunk to the music.