silk quotes

There was a girl in our town, Silk an'satin was her gown, Silk an'satin, gold an' velvet, Guess her name, three times I've telled it.

-Anonymous
Quoted in  James Orchard Halliwell  The Nursery Rhymes of England (1842). The answer, of course, is'Ann'.

Le style, comme la popeline, dissimule trop souvent de l'ecze  ma. Style, like sheer silk, too often hides eczema.

- Albert Camus
  La Chute, ch.1 (translated by Stuart Gilbert).

Our style should be as a skein of silk, to be carried and found by the right thread, not ravelled and perplexed; then all is a knot, a heap.

- Ben Jonson
Timber: or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter (published 1640).

A silk suit, which cost memuchmoney, and Ipray God to make me able to pay for it.

- Samuel Pepys
  Diary entry,1 Jul.

Let Sporus tremble'What? that thing of silk, Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk? Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel? Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

- Alexander Pope
  Of Lord Hervey.'An Epistle to DrArbuthnot', l.305^8.

Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amount of effort.

-Joseph Alois Schumpeter
  Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, p.67.

Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the self-same sounds On my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not a sound; And thus it is that what I feel, Here in this room, desiring you, Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk, Is music.

-Wallace Stevens
  Harmonium,'Peter Quince at the Clavier', pt.1.

The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.

-Wallace Stevens
  Opus Posthumous, Aphorisms,'Adagia'.