Plantation Proverbs.
Legends of the old Plantation (1886), "The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story".
Source: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
"A Film from the Sixties"
Poems New and Collected (1998), No End of Fun (1967)
“[Talking pictures are] like putting lip rouge on the Venus de Milo.”
Associated Press, "Mary Pickford Sees Talkies as Lipstick on Milo", Los Angeles Times, 18 March 1934, p. 1. Cf. "Los Angeles Times", 20 March 1934, p. A4: "Talking pictures are like lip rouge on the Venus de Milo."
Widely attributed in this form (e.g., A. Scott Berg, Goldwyn: A Biography (1989), Ch. 11) and described as having been said in the 1920s, but the 18 March 1934 AP story quotes it as said that day.
Variant: Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo.
“There are purple grapes in the Land of Git-Thare.”
The Land of Git-Thare, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
"All Day It Has Rained", line 17, from Raider's Dawn and Other Poems (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1942) p. 16.
