Four and twenty Yankees, feeling very dry, Went across the border to get a drink of rye. When the rye was opened, theYanks began to sing, 'God bless America, but God save the King!'

-Anonymous
c.1919  Ditty current in Canada, referring to  Americans crossing the border to drink during Prohibition. The Duke of  Windsor, later Edward VIII, heard it during his tour of Canada (1919) and repeatedit to his father, George V, onhis return, as he recalledin A King's Story (1951).

Let's get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini.

-Anonymous
c.1925  The origin of this line is disputed; it has been attributed to Billy Wilder, Charles Butterworth,  Alexander Woollcott and Robert Benchley's press agent. It was used by Mae West in Every Day's a Holiday (1937 film) and by Benchley in The Major and the Minor (1942 film).

O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dryand thirsty land, where no water is.

-Bible (Old Testament)
Psalms 63:1.

Tenants of the house, Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

-Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)
  'Gerontion'.

They must have hearts very dry and tough, from whom the melody of psalms doth not sometime draw that wherein a mind religiously affected delighteth.

-Hooker, Richard
  Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

They call her a young country, but they lie: She is the last of lands, the emptiest, A woman beyond her change of life, a breast Still tender but within the womb is dry.

-Hope, A(lec) D(erwent)
'Australia', in Collected Poems1930^1970 (1972).

Tawny are the leaves turned but they still hold, And it is harvest; what shall this land produce? A meagre hill of kernels, a runnel of juice; Declension looks from our land, it is old. Therefore let us assemble, dry, gray, spare, And mild as yellow air.

-Ransom,John Crowe
  Chills and Fever,'Antique Harvesters'.

We must say something but not much because I'm being held out to dry.

-Reagan, Ronald Wilson
  Comment at a meeting with National Security Council advisers,10 Nov. Quoted byTheodore Draper AVeryThin Line (1991).

Like giving dry birth to a porcupine.

-Simpson, Alan (Kooi)
  On the passage of immigration reform bill. In the Washingtonian, Mar.

In ten thousand years the Sierras Will be dryand dead, home of the scorpion. Ice-scratched slabs and bent trees. No paradise, no fall, Only the weathering land The wheeling sky, Man, with his Satan Scouring the chaos of the mind. Oh Hell!

-Snyder, Gary Sherman
  Riprap,'Milton By Firelight (Piute Creek, August1955)'.