In things that are tender and unpleasing, it isgood to break the ice by some whose words are of less weight, and to reserve the more weighty voice to come in as by chance.

-Bacon, Francis,Viscount St Albans
  Essays, no.22,'Of Cunning'.

Method acting? There are quite a few methods. Mine involves a lot of talent, a glass, and some cracked ice.

-Barrymore,John
Quoted in  Actors about  Acting, Loving, Living, Life (1972).

Best bloody place is bloody bed, With bloody ice on bloody head, You might as well be bloody dead, In bloody Orkney.

-Blair, Hamish pseudonym of  Andrew James Fraser Blair
  'The Bloody Orkneys', last stanza. First published in Arnold Silcock Verse and Worse,'Queer People'.

WatchingTallulah Bankhead on the stage islike watching somebody skating on very thin iceöand the English want to be there when she falls through.

-Campbell, Mrs Patrick ne¤  e Beatrice Rose StellaTanner
Quoted in The Times,13 Dec1968.

It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

-Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
  'Kubla Khan'.

In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.

-Emerson, RalphWaldo
Essays: First Series,'Prudence'.

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favour fire. But if I had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

-Frost, Robert Lee
  'Fire and Ice', complete poem.

   Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its ownmelting. A poemmay be worked overonce it isin being, but may not be worried into being.

-Frost, Robert Lee
  'The Figure a Poem Makes', preface to Collected Poems.

To curle on the ice, does greatly please, Being a manly Scottish exercise; It clears the Brains, stirs up the Native Heat, And gives a gallant appetite for Meat.

-Penecuik, DrAlex
  Quoted in Colin Jarman The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).

   Your anger was a climate I inhabited like a desert in a dry frigid weather of high thin air and ivory sun, sand dunes the wind lifted into stinging clouds that blinded and choked me where the only ice was in the blood.

-Piercy, Marge
  Stone, Paper, Knife,'TheWeight'.

Here gay Description Aegypt glads with showers; Or gives to Zembla fruits, to Barca flowers; Glitt'ring with ice here hoary hills are seen, There painted vallies of eternal green.

-Pope, Alexander
  The Dunciad, bk.1, l.71^4.

Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

-Roosevelt, Franklin D(elano)
  Renomination acceptance speech, Philadelphia, 27 Jun.

Poetry is a rich, full-blooded whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbers the leaf, the duet of two nightingales, the sweet pea, that has run wild,Creation's tears in shoulder blades.

-Stevens,Wallace
Quoted in Life,13 Jun1960.

Set me whereas the sun doth parch the green, Or where his beams may not dissolve the ice, In temperate heat, where he is felt and seen, With proud people, in presence sad and wise; Set me in base, or yet in high degree, In the long night, or in the shortest day, In clear weather, or where mists thickest be, In lusty youth, or when my hairs be grey† Yours will I be, and with that only thought Comfort myself when that my hap is nought.

-Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of
'Set me whereas the sun doth parch the green'.

Ice formed on the butler's upper slopes.

-Plum
  Pigs HaveWings, ch.5.

They say the ice age ended years ago. Why are there icicles everywhere?

-Zhao, Zhenkai pen name Beo Dao
c.1989  'Answer', collected in Donald Finkel A Splintered Mirror (1991).