fiddle quotes

O rattlin, roarin Willie, O he held to the fair; An'for to sell his fiddle And buy some other ware.

- Robert Burns
  'Rattlin, roarin Willie', stanza1.

There's many a good tune played on an old fiddle.

- Samuel Butler
  The Way of  All Flesh.

Music ismy mistress, and she playssecond fiddleto none.

- Duke (Edward Kennedy) Ellington
  Music Is My Mistress.

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Moore Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.

- Marianne Craig Moore
Poems,'Poetry'.

He is a rarity which I cannot but be fond of, as one would be of a hog that could fiddle, or a singing owl.

-JohnWilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester
c.1676  Of Dryden. Letter to Henry Savile. In The Letters ofJohn Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, edited byJeremyTreglown (1980).

For every word has its marrow in the English tongue for order and for delight. For the dissyllables such as able table &c are the fiddle rhymes. For all dissyllables and some trissyllables are fiddle rhymes. For the relations of words are in pairs first. For the relations of words are sometimes in oppositions. For the relations of words are according to their distances from the pair.

- Christopher Smart
^63  JubilateAgno, fragment B, l.595^600. (First published 1939.)

Fiddle, we know, is diddle: and diddle, we take it, is dee.

- Algernon Charles Swinburne
  The Heptalogia,'The Higher Pantheism in a Nutshell'.