Drumming Quotes (page 3)
Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?
It is not to ring the bell backward
Nor is it an incantation
To summon the spectre of a Rose.
We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us - a symbol:
A symbol...
T. S. Eliot
I think the most joyous thing in life is to loaf around and watch another bloke do a job of work. Look how popular are the men who dig up London with electric drills. Duke's son, cook's son, son of a hundred kings, people will stand there for hours on end, ear drums splitting. Why? Simply for the pleasure of being idle while watching other people work.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Ourchestra: So you haven't got a drum, just beat your belly. So I haven't got a horn-I'll play my nose. So we haven't any cymbals-We'll just slap our hands together, And though there may be orchestras. That sound a little better. With their fancy shiny instruments. That cost an awful lot-Hey, we're making music twice as good. By playing what we've got!
Shel Silverstein
What, are there masques? Hear you me, Jessica: Lock up my doors; and when you hear the drum. And the vile squealing of the wry-neck'd fife, Clamber not you up to the casements then, Nor thrust your head into the public street. To gaze on Christian fools with varnish'd faces, But stop my house's ears, I mean my casements: Let not the sound of shallow foppery enter
William Shakespeare
The rockets set the bony meadows afire, turned rock to lava, turned wood to charcoal, transmuted water to steam, made sand and silica into green glass which lay like shattered mirrors reflecting the invasion, all about. The rockets came like drums, beating in the night. The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke.
Ray Bradbury
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum. Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead. Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, Put crpe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong. The stars are not wanted now: put out...
W. H. Auden