“I'll string a fiddle with your guts and make you play it while I dance.”
Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind
Source: The Name of the Wind
Advice passed to the chess player and teacher Jack Collins while watching chess master Robert Byrne snip off his pawns.
The Bright Side of Chess (Hollis and Carter, 1952).
“I'll string a fiddle with your guts and make you play it while I dance.”
Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind
Source: The Name of the Wind
Robert Fulghum book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Source: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism
Source: Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968), p. 223
Context: Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic: it has no attributes peculiar to fallen angels. It is not even Machiavellian, for Machiavelli's teaching was graceful, subtle, and colorful. Nor is it Neronian. Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.
“When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea.”
W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright
The Fiddler Of Dooney http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1620/, st. 1 <br class="br">The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)
“It needs more skill than I can tell
To play the second fiddle well.”
Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) British preacher, author, pastor and evangelist
The Salt-Cellars http://books.google.com/books?id=CmAUAAAAYAAJ&q=%22It+needs+more+skill+than+I+can+tell+To+play+the+second+fiddle+well%22&pg=PA284#v=onepage (1885)
Tom Lehrer (1928) American singer-songwriter and mathematician
"The Vatican Rag"
That Was the Year That Was (1965)