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# Weekend Words: Dry
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-dry/
- Published: 2015-04-12T13:02:44.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:31:37.000Z
- Description: In response to a prolonged dry spell, the state of California has instituted mandatory water restrictions, bringing to mind the line from Chinatown (1974): "Middle of a drought, the water commissioner drowns. Only in L.A."
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:08 (2014, 2015, part 2)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2015/04/dry.jpg)

Béla Iványi Grünwald, “Drying Clothes” (1903), oil on canvas, 166 x 133 cm, Magyar Nemzeti Galéria, Budapest (image via Web Gallery of Art)

In response to a prolonged dry spell, the state of California has instituted mandatory water restrictions, bringing to mind the line from *Chinatown* (1974): “Middle of a drought, the water commissioner drowns. Only in L.A.”

> My soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh also longeth after thee: in a barren and dry land where not water is.  
>  
> **—Psalms, 63:2, Book of Common Prayer**

> You ought to get out of those wet clothes and into a dry Martini.  
>  
> **—Mae West, *Every Day’s a Holiday***

> Your dry heat feels like power  
> your eyes are stars of a different magnitude  
> they reflect lights that spell out: EXIT  
>  
> **—Adrienne Rich, “Trying to Talk with a Man”**

> Tenants of the house,  
> Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.  
>  
> **—T.S. Eliot, “Gerontion”**

> What happens to a dream deferred?  
>  
> Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?  
> Or fester like a sore  
> And then run?  
> Does it stink like rotten meat?  
> Or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet?  
>  
> **—Langston Hughes, “Harlem”**

> The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?  
>  
> **—Katharine Hamnett**

> I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else.  
>  
> **—Alice Munro**

> O rose, who dares to name thee?  
> No longer roseate now, nor soft, nor sweet,  
> But pale, and hard, and dry, as stubblewheat,–  
> Kept seven years in a drawer, thy titles shame thee.  
>  
> **—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “A Dead Rose”**

> The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry;  
> The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy;  
> The books that people talk about we never can recall;  
> And the books that people give us, oh, they’re the worst of all.  
>  
> **—Carolyn Wells, *On Books***

> If there is an eighth deadly sin, it ought to be stupidity, by which all virtues run out into dry sands. Yet…where does prudence end and cowardice begin? That’s a very good damn question!  
>  
> **—Lois McMaster Bujold, *The Spirit Ring***

> I haven’t much opinion of words. They’re apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that’s what I say.  
>  
> **—Ellen Glasgow, *The Deliverance***