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tune quotes

  • I am not going to spend any time whatsoever attacking the Foreign Secretary.Quite honestly, I am beginning to feel extremely sorry for him. If we complain about the tune, there is no reason to attack the monkey when the organ grinder is present.

    - Aneurin Bevan
      Expressing his wish to address Prime Minister Harold Macmillan rather than Selwyn Lloyd on the Suez crisis in the House of Commons, May.

  • Different rhymes for different times Different styles for different climes Someday them rogues in Whitehall Be forced to change their tune.

    - Erna Brodber
      Myal, ch.15.

  • O my Luve's like a red, red rose That's newly sprung in June; O my luve's like the melodie That's sweetly play'd in tune. As fair art thou, my bonie lass, So deep in luve am I; And I will luve thee still, my Dear, Till a'the seas gang dry. Till a'the seas gang dry, my Dear, And the rocks melt wi' the sun: O I will love thee still, my Dear, While the sands o' life shall run.

    - Robert Burns
      'A red, red rose'.

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

    - Samuel Butler
      The Way of  All Flesh.

  •    The angels all were singing out of tune, And hoarse with having little else to do, Excepting to wind up the sun and moon, Or curb a runaway young star or two.

    -Rochdale
      The Vision of  Judgement, stanza 2.

  • He was an average guy who could carry a tune.

    - Bing originally Harry Lillis Crosby Crosby
    Suggesting his own epitaph. Quoted in David Pickering Brewer's Twentieth Century Music (1994).

  • 'Hope' is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul And sings the tune without the words And never stopsat all

    - Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
    c.1860  Complete Poems, no.254 (first published1891).

  • There's Carol like a rolling car, And Martin like a flying bird, And Adam like the Lord's First Word, And Raymond like the Harvest Moon, And Peter like a piper's tune, And Alan like the flowing on Of water. And there's John, like John.

    - Eleanor Farjeon
      Then There Were Three,'Boys' Names'.

  • Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool. Sweet blues!

    - (James Mercer) Langston Hughes
      'The Weary Blues'.

  • Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony. But organically I am incapable of a tune.

    - Charles Lamb
      Essays of Elia,'A Chapter on Ears'.

  • I must be mad, or very tired, When the curve of a blue bay beyond a railroad track Is shrill and sweet to me like the sudden springing of a tune, And the sight of a white church above thin trees in a city square Amazes my eyes as though it were the Parthenon.

    - Amy Lowell
      'Meeting-House Hill'.

  • A place as kind as it isgreen, the greenest place I've never seen. Every name is a tune.

    - Marianne Craig Moore
    What  AreYears,'Spencer's Ireland'.

  •    A lamentable tune is the sweetest music to a woeful mind.

    - Nevil originally Nevil Shute Norway Shute
      Arcadia, pt.2.

  • All night has the casement jessamine stirred To the dancers dancing in tune; Till a silence fell with the waking bird, And a hush with the setting moon.

    -Tennyson
      Maud, pt.1, sect.22, stanza 3, l.864^7.

  • The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending we lay waste our powers: Little we see in nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! The sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.Great God! I'd rather be A pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathe'  d horn.

    -William Wordsworth
      'The world is too much with us; late and soon', complete poem (published1807).

  • O Oisin, mount by me and ride To shores by the wash of the tremulous tide, Where men have heaped no burial-mounds, And the days pass by like a wayward tune.

    -W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats
      'TheWanderings of Oisin', l.80^3.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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