"Writing desk" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hole of large proportions had rent a gash in the outer front wall, leaving the window woodwork, bricks and wall-paper piled up in a heap on the floor, partially obliterating a large writing desk. Private papers lay about in profusion, all dirty, damp and muddy. The remains of a window blind and half its roller hung in the space left by the absent window, and mournfully tapped against the remnant of the framework ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather
... 1795)." says M. Baileul, "there was hardly a single article of furniture in it. In a small room, round a little broken table, one of the legs of which had given way from age, on which table they had deposited a quire of letter-paper, and a writing desk 'a calamet', which luckily they had had the precaution to bring with them from the Committee of Public safety, seated on four rush-bottomed chairs, in front of some logs of wood ill-lighted, the whole borrowed from the porter Dupont; who would believe that it was in this ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... house had been in the old gay days; dark from much tragedy it seemed to-day. What would it be to her when she came back again? But, little by little, the old room soothed and stilled her. There were the sedate four-poster bed and the demure dresser and the little writing desk, good mahogany all of them; come by devious paths from a Virginia plantation; the cool blue of walls and rugs and hangings; the few pictures she had loved; three framed photographs of the Los Angeles football squad; a framed photograph of Jimsy in his class play; a bowl of dull blue pottery filled ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... to risk the loss of it by attempting a new style of composition. I therefore threw aside the work I had commenced, without either reluctance or remonstrance. This portion of the manuscript was laid aside in the drawers of an old writing desk, which, on my first coming to reside at Abbotsford in 1811, was placed in a lumber garret, and entirely forgotten. Thus, though I sometimes, among other literary avocations, turned my thoughts to the continuation of the romance which I had commenced, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... opened his own door. The room was pleasant. The fire burned warm, the piano stood open, the sofa was untidy with cushions and papers. Books and papers covered the big writing desk. Beyond the screen made by the bookshelves and the piano were two beds, with washstand by one of the large windows, the one ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... last afternoon of their waiting Scotty composed himself under a gum acacia tree near the river to write home. They expected to go at any moment and he must leave a last message for Granny. With the aid of an old box for a writing desk and the battered lid of a tin can for an inkbottle he managed his task fairly well. The sun was blazing down on rock and sand and river, but the breeze from the north blew up cool and grateful, reminding him of the June zephyrs that came up from Lake Oro to ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... dear, what do we do to-day? I've just looked over my calendar, and I want to see yours. Really, we are so crowded that we've got to cut something out—we really have." As she spoke she crossed to Dorothy's slim-legged, satin wood writing desk, and picked up an engagement book. "You lunch with the Wootherspoons—that's good. Then I can go to the Caldens for bridge in the afternoon at four. You won't be back from the matinee and tea at the Van Vaughns' until after six, and we dine at the Belmans' ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... parlour, which was a very fine room, papered and hung with prints, and furnished with a rocking-chair, and a table and a sofa in the European style. There was a shelf of books besides, and a family Bible in the midst of the table, and the lock-fast writing desk against the wall; so that anyone could see it was the house of a man ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... all and that she must see and know it. It was not like any other room she had seen. It looked more simple, though it was a pretty place. The walls were covered with roses, there were bright pictures, and shelves full of books. There was also a little writing desk and there were two or three low chairs, and a low table. A closet in a corner had its door ajar and Judith could see that inside toys were piled together. In another corner a large doll's house stood, looking as if ...
— In the Closed Room • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a great many lamentations and conjectures as to the missing article. Finally the supposed owner declared she must write immediately to her jewellers to know if they had the bracelet, either for repair or safe keeping. Satinalia was despatched for a writing desk; ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner
... were eaten and the siesta enjoyed,—though stay-at-homes may think the latter an absurdly superfluous luxury, taking into consideration the quality of the former! Here the letters from home—so welcome to the soldier—were devoured again, and with his inverted plate for a writing desk, roughly answered. Here some dreamed reveries, and gazed across the river anxiously homeward, remembering the advancing columns of the enemy and the perils of our situation. Here we discussed the cupidity and poltroonery of the ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... gilt in a very splendid manner. These bedsteads consist of moveable frames about twelve feet square, and within them are disposed couches, chairs, tables, and the requisites for the toilet, besides a writing desk, so that a bedstead in China contains all the furniture of the room. Some of these were valued at five and six hundred dollars, but were very highly ornamented ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... did a few days ago? Looking at your portrait, which you had signed "Santo Spirito Cavaliere", it occurred to me to write a "Rienzi fantasia" for pianoforte. If it should amuse you for a moment my time will have been well employed. I should tell you that your little bust adorns my writing desk. You are of course without the company of any other celebrities—no Mozart, no Beethoven, no Goethe, or whatever their names may be. To this room, which is the heart of the house, none of them is admitted. What a beautiful day it will be ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... always reminded of Ibsen in Cambridge. In Cambridge and the plays of Ibsen alone does it seem appropriate for the heroine before the great crisis of life to "enter, take off her overshoes, and put her wet umbrella upon the writing desk."... ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... Chicago, Illinois, Martha Foote kept these cushions always crisply white, would make any further characterization superfluous. The couch made you think of a plump grandmother of bygone days, a beruffled white fichu across her ample, comfortable bosom. Then there was the writing desk; a substantial structure that bore no relation to the pindling rose-and-cream affairs that graced the guest rooms. It was the solid sort of desk at which an English novelist of the three-volume school might have written a whole row of books without losing his dignity or cramping his ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... simple little thing like that? To summon Arima and enquire of that trusty henchman whether, in the hurry of departure from the survey camp, he had remembered to pack up and bring away his master's writing desk was naturally the next thing in order. Upon learning that the desk had not been forgotten, Escombe at once had it brought to him, and sat down and wrote a long letter, addressed jointly to his mother and sister. This letter contained a full account of his abduction and all that had followed ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... the little den at the back of the hall, where he kept his writing desk and account books and held interviews with his ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... do it," she said; "I wonder I had not thought of it before." Then she went to her writing desk, and wrote a letter and ...
— Sunshine Factory • Pansy
... a small writing desk was another telephone. He snatched it up nervously and gave the call number of the place where he had held ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... please!" said Braschi, with a smile, stepping to his writing desk and rapidly throwing some lines upon paper, which he signed after it had ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... there and then, and for the first time since the summer day when Luke Raeburn had been turned out of his father's house, she wrote to her brother. Rose in the meantime had taken a piece of paper from her mother's writing desk, and with a fat volume of sermons by way of a desk was scribbling away as fast as she could. This ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... of Deer, Wyoming, took up two compartments of Mrs. Cummings' writing desk, and she was called upon to be postmistress fifteen minutes twice a week, when the small boy, mounted on a tough little pony, happened around with the leather bag which carried the mail to and from Jackson, thirty ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... more extensive than I had supposed it to be; but it was close and hot, and I was rather glad when we got into our boat again to pull off to our ship, which is lying about 2- 1/2 miles from the shore. It was calm and cool on the water; and after reaching my ship, I have sat down to my writing desk, having placed one of the ship's attendants (a disbanded sepoy, I believe) at the punkah which has lately been fitted up in my cabin. It is wonderful what a comfort these punkahs are! I was suffocated with heat before my sepoy began ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... legal documents on the writing desk]. Oh, I thought that was all over with, and now I must weary myself by going through all that torture again—all the accusations, all the testimony and all ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... on the face of our bleak west coast, dominated by a broad stretch of sea, and having the sound of the waves always rumbling over it. Mr. Curphy's house faced the shore and his office was an upper room plainly furnished with a writing desk, a deal table, laden with law books and foolscap papers, a stiff arm-chair, covered with American leather, three or four coloured engravings of judges in red and ermine, a photograph of the lawyer himself in wig and gown, an illuminated certificate of his membership ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... eyes beseeching us not to believe the hundred misrepresentations we may have heard, but to trust her, the person who had lived with him long, and who knew him best and last. After breakfast she took us to her house, where Voltaire had lived, and where we saw his chair and his writing desk turning on a pivot on the arm of the chair: his statue smiling, keen-eyed, and emaciated, said to be a perfect resemblance. In one of the hands hung the brown and withered crown of bays, placed on his head ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... how well your house is furnished. When papa had bought his new weapon cabinet and hung above his writing desk the head of a buffalo, and beneath that a picture of old general Wrangel, under whom he had once served as an adjutant, he was very proud of what he had done. But when I see these things here, all ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... to touch anything lying or being upon Frank Willard's writing desk which father gave her. I promise never to ask either by speaking, writing, or signing, or in any other way, any person or body to take off or put on anything on said stand and desk without special permission from said Frank Willard. I promise never ...
— Modern Americans - A Biographical School Reader for the Upper Grades • Chester Sanford
... sulk, that was not her nature; she turned back to her writing desk with an offended air, but with a smile as of one who tolerates the vagaries of an inferior. This, she knew, would irritate her aunt more ...
— Raspberry Jam • Carolyn Wells
... to have been instantaneous, resulting from an effusion of blood upon the brain. When I was summoned I found him lying dead by the writing desk in his library at Fulcombe Priory. He had been writing at the desk, for on it was a piece of paper on which appear these words: "I have seen her. I—" There the writing ends, not stating whom he thought he had seen in the moments ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... among my books, and walled around with all the comfort and protection which they and my fireside could afford me—to wit, a table of higher piled books at my back, my writing desk on one side of me, some shelves on the other, and the feeling of the warm fire at my feet—I began to consider how I loved the authors of those books. ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... I was quietly established in my new quarters; my books all arranged, my writing desk placed by a window looking out into the field; and I felt as snug as Robinson Crusoe, when he had finished his bower. For several days I enjoyed all the novelty of change and the charms which grace a new lodgings before one has found out their defects. I rambled about the fields ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... by the labour of the day. Then, when you retire into your study, in the books on your shelves you revisit so many venerable friends with whom you can converse. Your own spirit scarcely less free from personal anxieties than the great minds, that in those books are still living for you! Even your writing desk with its blank paper and all its other implements will appear as a chain of flowers, capable of linking your feelings as well as thoughts to events and characters past or to come; not a chain of iron, which binds you down to think of the future and the remote by recalling the claims and feelings ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... or slowly, according to its weight or size. My piano, my grand piano, bounded past with the gallop of a horse and a murmur of music in its sides; the smaller articles slid along the gravel like snails, my brushes, crystal, cups and saucers, which glistened in the moonlight. I saw my writing desk appear, a rare curiosity of the last century, which contained all the letters I had ever received, all the history of my heart, an old history from which I have suffered so much! Besides, there were inside of it a ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... Prue had satisfied her with "Perhaps so, darling," and then had fallen silently to wondering why she and Prue might not travel some day, a year in Europe had always been one of her postponed intentions, and, by and by, how her child would enjoy it. Marjorie's books and writing desk were on the table also, for she had studied mental philosophy and chemistry after she had copied her composition and written a long letter to her mother. Short letters were as truly an impossibility to ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... sat in his office in the populous, thriving city of R——, situated in one of our western states. He occupied an easy chair, heels upon a low, flat-topped writing desk, newspaper in hand, reading an account of the failure of Dr. Nansen to reach the North Pole. That renowned and hardy explorer proposed reaching the spot by floating on an ice floe. We are all familiar with the fact that he did actually get to within about three hundred miles ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... ... no anger at all; and imprecations of vengeance, for what? Observe, I only speak of cases possible; of sudden impotency of mind; that is possible—there are other ways of 'changing,' 'ceasing to love' &c. which it is safest not to think of nor believe in. A man may never leave his writing desk without seeing safe in one corner of it the folded slip which directs the disposal of his papers in the event of his reason suddenly leaving him—or he may never go out into the street without a card in his pocket to signify his address to ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... we both stood still—Lady de Vaux moved in spite of her stately composure, and I spellbound. He was sitting before an oak writing desk covered with papers, and in the midst of them his head was resting upon his bowed arms. He neither spoke nor moved, nor seemed indeed in any way conscious of our approach. The window fronting him was, unlike all the others, uncurtained and wide open, and a flood of sunshine was streaming ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... accumulated the vast sum of three dollars each, and walked about with their hands in their pockets, and talked largely of purchases, like gentlemen of substance. They thought of getting mamma a new muff, and papa a writing desk, besides trinkets innumerable for sisters, and a big doll for Ally; but after they had made one expedition to a neighboring town to inquire prices, I observed that their expectations were greatly moderated. As to little Willie, him ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... us, as we strolled up to his writing desk, but pushed aside the few letters which he had not finished and asked us ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... no time in speculation over that, however. The moment I was left to myself I jumped up and rushed to a writing desk, a carved antique which had caught my eye upon my entrance, which I had studied from my place in the easy chair. It was unlocked, and I opened it without compunction. With an alert ear, to warn me the moment the colored boy hung up, I first gazed rather helplessly at a huge pile of literary litter. ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... word, she drew up her writing desk, and soon a finished letter was lying before her. Ere she had time to fold and direct it, a loud cry from her young brother Willie summoned her for a few moments from the room, and on her return she met in the doorway the ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... photographs," and Carline turned to a writing desk built into the motorboat. He brought out fifteen or twenty photographs. Terabon looked at them eagerly. He could not associate the girl of the pictures with the island shack, with this weakling man, nor yet ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... of the Roost many years since, at the time when Diedrich Knickerbocker came into this neighborhood.... Mementoes of the sojourn of Diedrich Knickerbocker are still cherished at the Roost. His elbow chair and antique writing desk maintain their place in the room he occupied, and his old cocked hat still hangs on a ...
— The New York and Albany Post Road • Charles Gilbert Hine
... wants a bibliographical background for the ocean and South Sea books. Melville's London notebook is published for the first time and there is a nearly complete reprint of his first known published paper 'Fragments From a Writing Desk,' which appeared in two numbers of The Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser in 1839 (not 1849, as the bibliography erroneously gives it). Mr. Weaver is probably right in ascribing Melville's retirement from literature to poverty (it was a fortunate ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton |
