
Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes
Song lyrics, Graceland (1986)
Source: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes
Song lyrics, Graceland (1986)
The Legacy of the Civil War (1961), pp. 49–50
Context: We are right to see power prestige and confidence as conditioned by the Civil War. But it is a very easy step to regard the War, therefore, as a jolly piece of luck only slightly disguised, part of our divinely instituted success story, and to think, in some shadowy corner of our mind, of the dead at Gettysburg as a small price to pay for the development of a really satisfactory and cheap compact car with decent pick-up and road-holding capability. It is to our credit that we survived the War and tempered our national fiber in the processs, but human decency and the future security of our country demand that we look at the costs. What are some of the costs?
Blood is the first cost. History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that. It was real blood, not tomato catsup or the pale ectoplasm of statistics, that wet the ground at Bloody Angle and darkened the waters of Bloody Pond. It modifies our complacency to look at the blurred and harrowing old photographs — the body of the dead sharpshooter in the Devil's Den at Gettysburg or the tangled mass in the Bloody Lane at Antietam.
The Lady of Shalott (1832)
Context: p>Lying, robed in snowy white
That loosely flew to left and right —
The leaves upon her falling light —
Thro' the noises of the night,
She floated down to Camelot:
And as the boat-head wound along
The willowy hills and fields among,
They heard her singing her last song,
The Lady of Shalott.Heard a carol, mournful, holy,
Chanted loudly, chanted lowly,
Till her blood was frozen slowly,
And her eyes were darkened wholly,
Turn'd to tower'd Camelot.
For ere she reach'd upon the tide
The first house by the water-side,
Singing in her song she died,
The Lady of Shalott.</p
Diamonds, Unapologetic (2012). Cowritten with Benjamin Levin, Mikkel Eriksen and Tor Hermansen.
Songs
“Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust,
Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.”
Act V, scene v.
Duchess of Malfi (1623)
“She shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly — but at a distance.”
On his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, Chapter 1 (Childhood).
My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930)
“No matter what you wear… to me, you will always have diamonds on the soles of your shoes.”
Source: Lover Avenged
“What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!”
Source: Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
“The yellow star? So what? It's not lethal…”
Poor Father! Of what then did you die?
Night (1960)