Quotes about rhyme

A collection of quotes on the topic of rhyme, time, timing, poetry.

Quotes about rhyme

“The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

Love, Flowers, Lovers, Sun

“I dream of silent verses where the rhyme
Glides noiseless as an oar.”

Richard Aldington (1892–1962) English writer and poet

From At the British Museum Collected Poems, 1929

Dreams

“It was all a dream, I used to read Word Up magazine. Salt-n-Peppa, Heavy D up in tha limousine. Hangin' pictures on my wall, every Saturday rap attack, Mr. Magic Marley Marl. I let my tape rock till my tape pop, smoking weed and bamboo, sippin' on Private Stock. Way back, when I had the red-and-black lumberjack, with the hat to match. Remember Rappin' Duke? Duh-ha duh-ha, you never thought that hip hop would take it this far. Now I'm in the limelight 'cause I rhyme tight. Time to get paid, blow up like the World Trade! Born sinner, the opposite of a winner. Remember when I used to eat sardines for dinner.”

The Notorious B.I.G. (1972–1997) American rapper

Song lyrics, Ready to Die (1994), "Juicy"

World, Dreams, Way, Time

“Rock and roll is a music, and why should a music contribute to … juvenile delinquency? If people are going to be juvenile delinquents, they're going to be delinquents if they hear … Mother Goose rhymes.”

Elvis Presley (1935–1977) American singer and actor

Pop Chronicles, Show 7 - The All American Boy: Enter Elvis and the rock-a-billies. Part 1 http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc19754/m1/, interview recorded 1956 http://web.archive.org/web/20110615153027/http://www.library.unt.edu/music/special-collections/john-gilliland/o-s.

People, Music

“Reading ideas improves,
reading stories entertains,
reading the news informs,
reading books teaches,
reading the song rhymes”

Josephs Quartzy (1999) Tanzanian actor

Source: Sweetest song I know

Reading, Books, Idea

“History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Origins unclear. Earliest known match in print comes from 1970, in a collection called “Neo Poems” by Canadian artist John Robert Colombo, who recalled reading it sometime in the 1960s. Twain did say "History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends." in the 1874 edition of “The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day”. A thematic precursor, "History May Not Repeat, But It Looks Alike", appears in a 1941 article by Chicago Tribune in Illinois. (Source: Quote Investigator https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/) Misattributed

History

“I set it off with my own rhyme
cause I'm as ill as a convict who kills for phone time”

Nas (1973) American rapper, record producer and entrepreneur

Halftime
On Albums, Illmatic (1994)

Time

“My song can make you cry, take you by surprise. At the same time, can make your dry your eyes with the same rhyme. See what you're seeing is a genius at work, which to me isn't work, so it's easy to misinterpret it at first.”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

"My Dad's Gone Crazy"
2000s, The Eminem Show (2002)

Time, Cry

“Universities are turning out thousands of reporters. They are quite bright and they don't have to rhyme.”

Mighty Sparrow (1935) Grenadian musician

Kurlansky, Mark. 1992. A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbean Destiny. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-52396-5, p. 121.

Universe

“Nihilist and Christian. They rhyme, and do not merely rhyme…”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Antichrist

Nihilist und Christ: das reimt sich, das reimt sich nicht bloss.
Sec. 58, as translated by R. J. Hollingdale. In German these words do rhyme; variant translation: Nihilist and Christian. They rhyme, and they do indeed do more than just rhyme.
The Antichrist (1888)

“Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme
of things not found within recorded time.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy works

Mythopoeia (1931)

Time

“Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells.”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Bells

"The Bells", st. 1 (1849).

Music, Time

“In sorrow there is no rhyme. Dream the kind of a life that you will find
The kind of love that lasts forever.
Dream the kind of a life that you will find
The kind of love that lasts forever. In heaven there is no time.”

Becky Stark (1976) American singer

In Heaven There Is No Heat
Cavalry of Light (2005)

Love, Life, Dreams, Time

“What's Rome to me, what business have I there?
I who can neither lie, nor falsely swear?
Nor praise my patron's undeserving rhymes,
Nor yet comply with him, nor with his times?”

Juvenal book Satires

III, lines 75-78, John Dryden, trans.
Satires, Satire III

Lie, Business, Time, Falseness

“There are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place; as when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in the wrong place; as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes or other normal amusements of mankind.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

Child Psychology and Nonsense (15 October 1921)

People, World, Education, Way

“I want to explain my environment to those who don't come any closer to it than the records they buy or the images they see on television. People want the truth. Even if they can't handle it, they want it. I let you know that I survived nine bullets not to sell records, but because it's the truth. Every time I sit down for an interview, I'm asked, "Well, 50, how did it feel to get shot nine times?" But those stories don't hold the weight, the pain, or the hope of my experience. It just can't. This is my mindset and these are the things that go on. This is why I say the rhymes that I say. This is what happened when I was trying to get rich before I died in Southside Queens.”

50 Cent (1975) American rapper, actor, businessman, investor and television producer

Extract of From Pieces to Weight: Once Upon a Time in Southside Queens http://aalbc.com/reviews/50_cent_interview.htm. Song lyrics, From Pieces to Weight: Once Upon a Time in Southside Queens (2005)

Pain, People, Truth, Hope

“The sad rhyme of the men who proudly clung
To their first fault, and withered in their pride.”

Robert Browning Paracelsus

Part 4.
Paracelsus (1835)

Men, Sadness

“There is both rhyme and reason in what I say, I have made a dream poem of humanity. I will cling to it. I will be good. I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts. For therein lies goodness and love of humankind, and in nothing else.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 6; variant translation: I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts! For therein, and in nothing else, lies goodness and love of humankind.

Love, Death, Dreams

“The best critics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demand perfect rhyming, and no aspirant for fame can afford to depart from a standard so universal. It is evidently the true goal of the English, as well as of the French bard; the goal from which we are but temporarily deflected during the preceding age.
But exceptions should and must be made in the case of a few who have somehow absorbed the atmosphere of other days, and who long in their hearts for the stately sound of the old classic cadences. Well may their predilection for imperfect rhyming be discouraged to a limited extent, but to chain them wholly to modern rules would be barbarous. Every limited mind demands a certain freedom of expression, and the man who cannot express himself satisfactorily without the stimulation derived from the spirited mode of two centuries ago should certainly be permitted to follow without undue restraint a practice so harmless, so free from essential error, and so sanctioned by precedent, as that of employing in his poetical compositions the smooth and inoffensive allowable rhyme.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

The Allowable Rhyme (1915)
Non-Fiction

Age, Error, Freedom, Universe

“A spaceship rhymes with all the dreams, nascent wonder, and hope of a humanity looking up in awe at an excruciatingly beautiful Cosmos, with”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

The Cosmos as a Poem (2010)

Beauty, Dreams, Hope

“I woke up early this morning with a new state of mind,
A creative way to rhyme without usin' knives and guns.
Keep your nose out the sky, keep your heart to God,
And keep your face to the rising sun. I feel like one day you'll understand me, dawg
You can still love your man and be manly, dawg”

Kanye West (1977) American rapper, singer and songwriter

Family Business
Lyrics, The College Dropout (2004)

God, Way, Understanding, Sun

“Alec muttered a retort into his coffee. It rhymed with something that sounded a lot more like "ducking glass mole.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

Coffee

“You know I used to be the back porch poet with my book of lines, always hoping knowing all the time, I'm probably never gonna find the perfect rhyme… For heavier things”

John Mayer (1977) guitarist and singer/songwriter

Books, Hope, Time, Perfection

“Curse us eh/I'll make you pay!/I don't want to rhyme all day!”

Rick Riordan book The Last Olympian

Source: The Last Olympian

“Cheap little rhymes
A cheap little tune
Are sometimes as dangerous
As a sliver of the moon.”

Langston Hughes (1902–1967) American writer and social activist

“My heart in passion, and my head on rhymes.”

George Gordon Byron Don Juan

Source: Don Juan

Passion, Heart

“It was an annoying name to have. People tended to spell in Mangus, rhymes with Angus. I always corrected them:At which point they would stare at me blankly.”

Rick Riordan book The Sword of Summer

Source: The Sword of Summer

People

“History says don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.”

Seamus Heaney The Cure at Troy

"Doubletake", from The Cure at Troy (1990)
Poetry Quotes, The Cure at Troy
Context: History says don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.

Justice, Hope, History

“No more rhymes now I mean it!”

“Anybody want a peanut?”

“AAHH!”

William Goldman book The Princess Bride

Source: The Princess Bride

“I can't even make up a rhyme about an umbrella, let alone death and life and eternal peace.”

Knut Hamsun book Mysteries

Source: Mysteries

Life, Death, Peace

“He was the mighty Fezzik, lover of rhymes, and you did not give up, no matter what.”

William Goldman book The Princess Bride

Source: The Princess Bride

Lovers

“Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme… they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.”

Philip Levine (1928–2015) Poet

Life

“A black cat crossed my path, and I stopped to dance around it widdershins and to sing the rhyme”

Joanne Harris book Chocolat

Source: Chocolat

Cats, Singing, Dance

“You're Bes, I guess?" I said.
"Yes," he said.
"Your car's a mess," Liz muttered.
"If one more person rhymes," Emma grumbled, "I'll throw up.”

Rick Riordan book The Throne of Fire

Source: The Throne of Fire

Cars, Personality

“I feel a little dizzy," said Orion. "But also wonderfully elated. I feel that I am on the verge of finding a rhyme for the word."

"Oxygen deprivation," said Foaly. "Or maybe it's just him.”

Eoin Colfer (1965) Irish author of children's books

Source: The Atlantis Complex

Feeling

“I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.”

Seamus Heaney book Death of a Naturalist

"Personal Helicon", line 19, from Eleven Poems (1965).
Other Quotes
Source: Death of a Naturalist

“The kitchen was just as empty, even the refrigerator gone, the chairs, the table--the kitchen cabinets stood open, their bare shelves reminder her of a nursery rhyme. She cleared her throat. "What would demons," she said, "want with our microwave?”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

“Nonsense," said the witcher. "And what's more, it doesn't rhyme. All decent predictions rhyme.”

Andrzej Sapkowski book The Last Wish

Source: The Last Wish

“Loafe with me on the grass—loose the stop from your throat;
Not words, not music or rhyme I want—not custom or lecture, not even the best;
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.”

Walt Whitman book Fulles d'herba

Source: Leaves of Grass

Music, Grass

“Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain —
To thy high requiem become a sod.”

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 6
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale
Source: Complete Poems and Selected Letters

Love, Death, Pain, Art

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end.”

Gilda Radner (1946–1989) American comedian

Way, Learning, Perfection

“He found himself wanting to write poetry about how her blue eyes were like starlight and her hair like night, because "night" and "starlight" rhymed, but he had a feeling the poem wouldn't turn out that well…”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Feeling, Night

“Travel, trouble, music, art, a kiss, a frock, a rhyme --
I never said they feed my heart, but still they pass my time.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker

Art, Music, Travel, Kiss

“Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Source: Nausea

People, Change

“Used to be goddy Now uptown feeling shoddy Bah, haiku don’t rhyme”

Rick Riordan book The Hidden Oracle

Source: The Hidden Oracle

Feeling

“Yours is the guilt of all, who, judging wrong,
Mistake tuned nonsense for the poet's song!
Provoking dulness!—what a soul has he
Who fancies rhyme, and measure, poetry!—
He thinks, profanely, that this generous art
Stops at the ear—with power to shake the heart.”

Aaron Hill (writer) (1685–1750) British writer

Advice to the Poets (1731), p. 32

Art, Soul, Thinking, Heart

“I'd love to write another song
Baby especially for you
I'd love to write another song
And feel things bright and new
In poetry I'd carve it well
I'd even make it rhyme
I'd love to write another song
Just to get some peace of mind.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

I'd Love to Write Another Song
Song lyrics, Avalon Sunset (1989)

Love, Peace, Feeling, Baby

“Well, when all is said and done
Best within my narrow way,
May some angel of the sun
Muse memorial o'er my clay:
'Here was beauty all betrayed
From the freedom of her state;
From her human uses stayed
On an idle rhyme to wait.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Beauty, Angels, Way, Freedom

“That was how I came to understand, how I came to know why all these brothers wrote and talked so big. Even the Knowledged feared the streets. But the rhyme pad was a spell book—it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back. That summer, I knew what Fruitie was trying to say, that when under the aegis of hip-hop, you never lived alone, you never walked alone.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975) writer, journalist, and educator

Source: The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir (2008), p. 111.

God, Books, Fear, Understanding

“Can't publish. Don't rhyme, don't scan.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Harold Wilson, Memoirs 1916-1964: The Making of a Prime Minister (Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Michael Joseph, London, 1986), p. 128.
Response to John Strachey who had to ask permission to publish a collection of poems while a Minister.
Attributed

“When I was born, one of those twisted
angels who live in the shadows said:
"Carlos, get ready to be a misfit in life!"
(…)
My God, why have you forsaken me
if you knew that I wasn't God,
if you knew that I was weak.
World so large, world so wide,
if my name were Clyde,
it would be a rhyme but not an answer.
World so wide, world so large,
my heart's even larger.
I shouldn't tell you,
but this moon
but this brandy
make me sentimental as hell.”

Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–1987) Brazilian poet

Quando nasci, um anjo torto
Desses que vivem na sombra
Disse: Vai Carlos! Ser gauche na vida.
(...)
Meu Deus, por que me abandonastes
se sabias que eu não era Deus,
se sabias que eu era fraco.
Mundo mundo vasto mundo,
se eu me chamasse Raimundo
seria uma rima, não seria uma solução.
Mundo mundo vasto mundo,
mais vasto é meu coração.
Eu não devia te dizer
mas essa lua
mas esse conhaque
botam a gente comovido como o diabo.
"Poema de sete faces" ["Seven-sided Poem"]
Alguma Poesia [Some Poetry] (1930)

Life, God, World, Angels

“The dull pulse-like beat started at eleven o’clock at night. It was a new kind of music called ‘rap’. It baffled Ananda even more than disco. He had puzzled and puzzled over why people would want to listen and even move their bodies to an angry, insistent onrush of words – words that rhymed, apparently, but had no echo or afterlife. It was as if they were an extension of the body: never had words sounded so alarmingly physical, and pure physicality lacks empathy, it’s machine-like.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Odysseus Abroad (2014)

People, Music, Night

“But were there ever any
Writh'd not of passed joy?
The feel of not to feel it,
When there is none to heal it,
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

"Stanzas", st. 3

Feeling, Sense, Joy

“Meanwhile, please pardon us for saying that we have found no music in the language of your letter, no rhyme in your reasoning, no value in your judgments, and no art or education in your performance as a whole.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)

Education, Art, Music

“Her face was all too bright for tears, she gave
Sighs to the wind, and weeping to the wave,
And left a lesson unto after-times,
Too little dwelt upon in minstrel rhymes,
A lesson how inconstancy should be
Repaid again by like inconstancy.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(1825-2) Ideal Likenesses. Ariadne
The Monthly Magazine

Tear, Time

“For nature beats in perfect tune,
And rounds with rhyme her every rune,
Whether she work in land or sea,
Or hide underground her alchemy.
Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Woonotes II, st. 7
1840s, Poems (1847)

Beauty, Nature, Perfection, Sea

“The first two lines, which rhymed 'kiddin' you' and 'didn't you,' just about knocked me out, and later on, when I got to the jugglers and the chrome horse and the princess on the steeple, it all just about got to be too much.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Discussing the song "Like a Rolling Stone" in Rolling Stone magazine (1988)

Horse, Princess

“We live in stormy and unsettled times. Hence we may confer a benefit, not only on ourselves, but on others, by diverting attention from the exciting circumstances of the present day—from the disheartening eccentricities of a literature which meanders in a thousand frivolous directions—to the calm regions where the inner man, self-examined, submits himself to moral treatment. Here our connection with things, our object, our duty, become clear; and, while we quietly separate ourselves from a world which is unable to assure us of anything, we feel that the joy we thought lost again returns, and that a second innocence spreads its clear and tranquillizing light over human existence. The child may amuse himself with childish rhymes. Man should find his recreation in reflecting on his relation to the things of this life. To all has this power been vouchsafed; by all should it be exercised.”

Ernst, Baron von Feuchtersleben (1806–1849) Austrian psychiatrist, poet and philosopher

The Dietetics of the Soul; Or, True Mental Discipline (1838)

Life, World, Feeling, Exercises

“Write her a poem, spill your heart to her in sweet cadences; but I didn't know how to write poetry. It was love and dove with me, bad rhymes, blundering sentiment. Oh Christ in Heaven, I'm no writer: I can't even put down a little quatrain. I'm no good in this world. I stood at the window and waved my hands at the sky; no good at all, just a cheap fake; neither writer nor lover; neither fish nor fowl.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Love, World, Lovers, Fish

“The all-inclusiveness of the RV in the realm of mythology is also observable in the sphere of poetics. There is hardly a major poetic device in the various IE branches that is not present in the RV. A significant aspect, for example, is that in early Greek poetry (epics of Homer and Hesiod, and some epigraphic material) the fairly strict syllabic meter (the hexameter with its dactylic, iambic and other variants) is preponderant with only traces of alliteration; in Germanic poetry alliteration prevails while the syllabic meter is very loose: both are present in the RV. …Early Irish poetry (6th century CE) has both meter and alliteration (and rhyme) but this hardly counts since the Irish poets knew these poetic devices “from Vergil and Ovid” and, of course, the Romans developed them from the Greek tradition. Of the Vedic poetic art Watkins writes: “The language of India from its earliest documentation in the Rigveda has raised the art of the phonetic figure to what many would consider its highest form.””

Nicholas Kazanas (1939)

"Indo-European Deities and the Rigveda," JIES 29 (2001), p. 257.

Art

“A rhyme's
…
a barrel of dynamite.
A line is a fuse
that's lit.
The line smoulders,
the rhyme explodes –
and by a stanza
a city
is blown to bits.”

Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) Russian and Soviet poet, playwright, artist and stage and film actor

"A Conversation with the Inspector of Taxes about Poetry" (1926); translation from Chris Jenks Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 1995) pp. 86-7

“I see in painters prose writers and poets. Rhyme, measure, and the turning of verses, which is indispensable and which gives them so much vigor, are analogous to the hidden symmetry, to the equilibrium at once wise and inspired, which governs the meeting or separation of lines and spaces, the echoes of color, etc….. but the beauty of verse does not consist of exactitude in obeying rules... It resides in a thousand secret harmonies and conventions which make up the power of poetry and which go straight to the imagination; in just the same way the happy choice of forms and the right understanding of their relationship act on the imagination in the art of painting.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Quote in Delacroix's Journal of 19 September 1847; as cited in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 229
1831 - 1863

Secret, Beauty, Art, Color

“Lovers to-day and for all time
Preserve the meaning of my rhyme:
Love is not kindly nor yet grim
But does to you as you to him.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"Advice To Lovers"
Country Sentiment (1920)

Love, Lovers, Time

“I invariably, after great familiarity with a film, concoct a personal way of reading it that relies entirely on information which a public audience would, I feel, have scant interest. I might travel from a casual unrehearsed glance of a minor character to a detail of folded cloth, from a rhyme in the dialogue to an over-excited high note in the music, from a misplaced shadow to a patch of rogue colour, from a shine on a furniture leg to a curious accidental photographic haze around a street lamp, from the examination of a cloud that looks like a snail to the discomfort of an actress who I know is stifling a sneeze.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Watching Water

Music, Way, Travel, Feeling

“Swinburne gave the coup de grace to English rhyme.”

F. S. Flint (1885–1960) English Imagist poet

Otherworld Cadences (1920)

“One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.”

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic

"Affirmations: As for Imagism", The New Age, January 1915

“Don't talk about my moms yo, sometimes he rhyme quick sometimes he rhyme slow, or vice versa. Whip up a slice o' nice verse pie, hit it on the first try, Villain…the worst guy.”

MF Doom (1971) hip hop artist from America

As Madvillain, "ALL CAPS", Madvillainy (2004)
Sourced Lines

Guy, Moms

“Rhymes with push-koo; I always say it sounds like a breakfast cereal.”

Eliza Dushku (1980) American actress

SHE'S A GOOD GIRL AT HEART by Terry Lawson (Detroit Free Press) http://www.elizadushkuonline.com/html_articles/2002/05_detroit-free-press.html Explaining how to pronounce her name.

“You can decide what you want to eat for dinner, you can decide to go away for the weekend, and you can decide what clothes you’re going to wear in the morning, but when it comes to artistic things, there’s never a rhyme or reason. It’s, like, they just happen. And they happen when they happen.”

Meat Loaf (1947) American musician, singer, songwriter, record producer and actor

A chat with Meat Loaf (2006)

Clothes

“I will venture to assert, that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

The Iliad of Homer: translated into English blank verse (1791), Preface.

Sense, Time

“He knew
Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.”

John Milton Lycidas

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 10

Singing

“Some force whole regions, in despite
O' geography, to change their site;
Make former times shake hands with latter,
And that which was before come after.
But those that write in rhyme still make
The one verse for the other's sake;
For one for sense, and one for rhyme,
I think 's sufficient at one time.”

Samuel Butler (poet) (1612–1680) poet and satirist

Canto I, line 23
Source: Hudibras, Part II (1664)

Thinking, Sense, Change, Time

“I've been working with Bill Shatner yea these 40-plus years. He never seems to get it right. I gave him, "It's Takei, as in way." I even said, "as in gay"… I told him, "It's Takei, rhymes with toupee."”

George Takei (1937) American actor and author

I thought that would do it. Quoted in Doug Elfman, "Takei celebrates legacy of diversity," http://www.lvrj.com/news/26861469.html Las Vegas Review-Journal (2008-08-12) Describing how he advised William Shatner, who reportedly could never pronounce his name correctly, how to say it aloud.

Way

“Bruzundanga's literature is ruled by cute, rhyming and tasteless sonnets.”

Lima Barreto book Os Bruzundangas

Os Bruzundangas (1923)

Literature

“The throb of fifty or a hundred million steam horse-power, doubling every ten years, and already more despotic than all the horses that ever lived, and all the riders they ever carried, drowned rhyme and reason. No one was to blame, for all were equally servants of the power, and worked merely to increase it; but the conservative Christian anarchist saw light.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Light, Horse

“As a working Sinologist, each time I look up a word in my Webster's or Kenkyusha's I experience a sharp pang of deprivation. Having slaved over Chinese dictionaries arranged in every imaginable order(by K'ang-hsi radical, left-top radical, bottom-right radical, left-right split, total stroke count, shape of successive stroke, four-corner, three corner, two-corner, Kuei-hsieh, ts'ang-chieh, telegraphic code, rhyme tables, phonetic keys, and so on ad nauseam), I have become deeply envious of specialists in those languages, such as Japanese, Indonesian, Hindi, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Korean, Vietnamese, and so forth, which possess alphabetically arranged dictionaries.”

Victor H. Mair (1943) American sinologist and linguist

The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese (February 1986).

Imagination, Time, Success

“The musical comedies of the month are She’s a Good Fellow and The Lady in Red, both of which owe their book and lyrics to Anne Caldwell—evidently a native of New York, judged by the casualness with which she rhymes “teacher” and “reach a.””

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Source: Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918–1923 (2014) https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25758762M/Dorothy_Parker_Complete_Broadway_1918-1923, Chapter 2: 1919, p. 82

Books, Music, Teachers

“Now I begin to know at last,
These nights when I sit down to rhyme,
The form and measure of that vast
God we call Poetry, he who stoops
And leaps me through his paper hoops
A little higher every time.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"The God Called Poetry".
Country Sentiment (1920)

God, Time, Night

“Yo, peep. This me name be Gore Vidal. I is spitting rhymes about early history. Why homies give props to Uzis, not books? Ain't nothing but a mystery, aight.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

As quoted in "Jah" http://listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=GCXBuoCDcrI#Gore_Vidal_Rap_on_Da_Ali_G_Show (15 August 2004), Da Ali G Show 2000s

Books, History

“My sense of rhyme used to be more involved in my songwriting than it is… Still staying in the unconscious frame of mind, you can pull yourself out and throw up two rhymes first and work it back. You get the rhymes first and work it back and then see if you can make it make sense in another kind of way. You can still stay in the unconscious frame of mind to pull it off, which is the state of mind you have to be in anyway.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Bob Dylan: The Song Talk Interview http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/1991zollo.htm by Paul Zollo (1991)

Way, Sense

“In this room, the salamander was squashed between the pages of the rhyming dictionary, thereby changing poetry forever. Here, Salome walked around with a big red fish held high up over her head. Old Father spanked her with a ballet slipper, sending her to bed without milk or honey. Dance was changed in this room, too.”

Tom Robbins Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994)

Fish, Change, Dance

“Frank: There, you see, an example of assonance.
Rita: Oh, it means getting' the rhyme wrong.”

Willy Russell book Educating Rita

Page 6.
Educating Rita (1980)

“Who says it's poetry, anyhow?
My ten year old
can do it and rhyme.
Mr Hines says so, and he's a schoolteacher,
he ought to know.
Go and find work”

Basil Bunting (1900–1985) Poet

What The Chairman Told Tom, from Odes II:6 (1965)

“The poetic act consists in suddenly seeing that an idea splits into a number of motives of equal value and in grouping them; they rhyme.”

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) French Symbolist poet

L'acte poétique consiste à voir soudain qu'une idée se fractionne en un nombre de motifs égaux par valeur et à les grouper; ils riment.
"Crise de Vers", La Revue Blanche (September 1895) as translated in Mallarmé : The Poet and his Circle ([1999] 2005) by Rosemary Lloyd, p. 231.
Observations

Motivation, Idea

“Jesus, if I know one thing about the industry, it's that it's a moment. A flash in the pan. That's what's lovely about it. But it's hard, because one moment you're the hot thing, and the next moment — you're not. And there's no rhyme or reason for it.”

Keira Knightley (1985) British actress

Interview in Allure magazine (October 2007)

Love

“More./What for? was a rhyme that deserved to be made more often.”

Edward St. Aubyn (1960) British writer

At Last, Chapter 6

“Putting all of my time
In learning to care
And a bucket of rhymes
I threw up somewhere
Want a locket of who
Made me lose my perfunctory view
Of all that is around
And of all that I do.”

Rufus Wainwright (1973) American-Canadian singer-songwriter and composer

I Don't Know What It Is
Song lyrics, Want One (2003)

Learning, Time

“Rochester: It would've been hard to rhyme a dollar ninety-eight.”

Jack Benny (1894–1974) comedian, vaudeville performer, and radio, television, and film actor

The Jack Benny Program (Radio: 1932-1955), The Jack Benny Program (Television: 1950-1965)

“My rhyming skills got you climbing hills, I'll travel through your mind into your spine like siren drills.”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

"Infinite"
1990s, Infinite (1996)

Travel

“Hey, my masters, lords and brothers, ye that till the fields of rhyme,
Are ye deaf ye will not hearken to the clamor of your time?”

James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)

Time

“I don't really care what people think about my hair. It's my hair, so why should they care? Ooh, that rhymed.”

Kelly Osbourne (1984) English singer-songwriter, actress, television presenter and fashion designer

The Osbournes

People, Thinking

“Poetry emulates the Cosmos perhaps because the Cosmos itself is the grandest conceivable example of rhythm, rhyme, harmony and concinnity.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

The Cosmos as a Poem (2010)

“I was promised on a time
To have reason for my rhyme;
From that time unto this season,
I received nor rhyme nor reason.”

Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) English poet

Lines on his Promised Pension; reported in Thomas Fuller, Worthies of England, vol ii, page 379, and in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Time, Season

“[Rhyme is] but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meter; … Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme, … as have also long since our best English tragedies, as… trivial and of no true musical delight; which [truly] consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Introduction to Paradise Lost Added, 1668

Age, Music, Sense, Learning