“Jewels, lies, slips of paper, dried flowers, memories of thing long past, useless quotations, idle hands, beads, buttons, and mischief.”

— Holly Black, book The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Source: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Jewels, lies, slips of paper, dried flowers, memories of thing long past, useless quotations, idle hands, beads, button…" by Holly Black?

Holly Black160

American children's fiction writer 1971

Related quotes

“In works of labour or of skill
I would be busy too:
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.”

Isaac Watts (1674–1748) English hymnwriter, theologian and logician

Song 20: "Against Idleness and Mischief".
1710s, Divine Songs Attempted in the Easy Language of Children (1715)

“Nothing useless is, or low;
Each thing in its place is best;
And what seems but idle show
Strengthens and supports the rest.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Builders

The Builders, st. 2 (1849).

“It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Source: My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930), Chapter 9 (Education At Bangalore).

“To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man's speech with other men's jewels; dangerous, for the same reason.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Robertson Davies Dangerous Jewels (1960).

“Who hath not saved some trifling thing
More prized than jewels rare,
A faded flower, a broken ring,
A tress of golden hair.”

Ellen Clementine Howarth (1827–1899) American writer

'Tis but a Little Faded Flower, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 12.

“A quotation's only a short neat way of sayin' somethin' everybody knows, like "It's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide."”

Margery Allingham book The Fashion in Shrouds

Italics in original
The Fashion in Shrouds, New York: Felony & Mayhem, 2008, chapter six, p. 58 (Originally published in 1938)
In standard English the italicized text means, "It's crazy to give a policeman the bribe in counterfeit money." It was popularized as a nonsense catchphrase by Mad magazine.
Fiction Writings