button quotes

Sic a wife as Willie's wife, I wad na gie a button for her.

- Robert Burns
  'Willie Wastle', or 'Sic a wife as  Willie's wife', stanza1.

So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf, to make an apple-pie; and at the same time a great she- bear coming up the street, pops its head into the shop. 'What! no soap?' So he died and she very imprudently married the barber; and there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyulies, and the Grand Panjandrumhimself, withthelittleround buttonat top; and they all fell to playing the game of catch-as- catch-can till the gunpowder ran out of theheels of their boots.

- Samuel Foote
Responding to a challenge from the actor Charles Macklin that there was no speech he could not repeat from memory after just one hearing. Macklin had to acknowledge defeat. Foote's phrases 'no soap'and 'the grand Panjandrum' became widely adopted. Quoted in Maria Edgeworth Harry and Lucy (1825), vol.2.

They called aloud 'Our Sieve ain't big, But we don't care a button! We don't care a fig!'

- Edward Lear
Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and  Alphabets,'The Jumblies'.

What they call 'heart' lies much lower than the fourth waistcoat button.

- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
c.1776^1779  Aphorisms, Notebook F (translated by R  J Hollingdale,1990).

And the softness of my body will be guarded by embrace By each button, hook, and lace. For the man who should loose me is dead, Fighting with the Duke in Flanders, In a pattern called a war. Christ! What are patterns for?

- Amy Lowell
  'Patterns'.