"Bric-a-brac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... scanning her with interest and approval. He was a plump rosy man of the blond Jewish type, with smart London clothes fitting him like upholstery, and small sidelong eyes which gave him the air of appraising people as if they were bric-a-brac. He glanced up interrogatively at the porch of ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... unlimited wealth, while the most perfect taste was displayed in the harmonizing tints of everything, the costly pictures, statuettes, bric-a-brac, and curios. ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... realizes. Then this loosening of the home tie renders easy the shifting from city to country and seashore. A considerable proportion of the $2000 to $5000 class shut up the flat or leave the boarding-house several times in the year. There is usually one place where the furniture and bric-a-brac and the other season's clothing are kept, but it is only a storehouse or a temporary retreat that holds their property, growing less and less as they move, until they may practically live ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... the disorder, the caddis worm adds to the flat spirals any dead shell that comes handy, without distinction of species, provided it be not excessively large. I notice, in its collection of bric-a-brac, the Physa, the Paludina, the Limnaea, the Amber snail [all pond snails] and even the Pisidium [a bivalve], ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... was an extremely happy day. She had coffee for breakfast, and was permitted by Alma, the hired girl, to dry all the cups and saucers. Then she dusted the parlour, including all the bric-a-brac, which made dusting here an engrossing occupation. Later she helped grandpa hoe the cabbages, and afterward "puttered around" with grandma in the flower-garden. Then she and grandma listened, very quietly, through a crack in the nearly-closed door while grandpa conducted a hearing ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... never-ceasing tongue, was bustling about, putting things in order; she was so nervous that she could not sit still. This couple had come from their birth-place only a year or so ago, and had brought all their wedding presents to their new home—pictures and bric-a-brac and linen. It was the prettiest home Hal had so far been in, and Mrs. David was risking it deliberately, because of her indignation that her husband had had to foreswear his union in order to get ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... the ceremony was to take place was the ordinary cottage parlor, with crochet work on the chairs, and a profusion of vases and bric-a-brac on the tables. The Rev. John Langdon requested Anna and Sanderson to stand by a little marble table from which the housekeeper brushed a profusion of knick-knacks. There was no Bible. Anna was the first to notice the omission. ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... domestic scene, a little village of half a dozen buildings and a net-work of white limestone and brush corrals. Shortly I was supping in a neat little cottage, and endeavoring in the usual way to be agreeable to some one in muslin. In this modern world we change our skies, truly, but not—not our bric-a-brac. On the walls of the pretty dining-room one beheld with rising feeling one's old friends the Japanese fan and the discarded plate still clinging with the touching persistence of the ivy to the oak. To be sure, there was a tall half-breed Indian moving ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... scurrilous followers of the great man, but did not. Suddenly we run up against a gentleman, who, raising his cloak over his head, is on the point of jumping into the Tiber. We seize him by his mantle, and discover in the intended suicide an old acquaintance, equally well known to the Jews and the bric-a-brac shops, whose tastes for speculation and articles of vertu have first brought him to the money-lenders, next to the dogs, and finally to the brink of the yellow Tiber. We give him all the sesterces we have about us, along with a few sustaining aphorisms from ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... I have said, was a Grind of the pure type. He was so nearsighted that he fell over chairs in drawing-rooms, and so awkward that his long arms occasionally brushed the bric-a-brac from mantels. No lady's train was safe if he was in the room. At gatherings of young people, if Johnson appeared, his presence was at once the signal for mirth, of which he was, of course, the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... similar about Williamson. But it was tacitly understood that there was nothing further to be said on that subject, and that the news of Myrtilla's life could hardly again take any more excitingly personal form than the bric-a-brac excitements of art or literature,—though indeed art and literature were, to be just to them, far more than bric-a-brac in the life of Myrtilla Williamson. They were, indeed, it was easy to see, a very ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... highest degree. The architecture was an entirely admirable specimen of Flemish domestic work of the best period, and the internal decoration and the furniture matched to a nicety the exterior. It was in that grave and silent abode, with Alresca, that I first acquired a taste for bric-a-brac. Ah! the Dutch marquetry, the French cabinetry, the Belgian brassware, the curious panellings, the oak-frames, the faience, the silver candlesticks, the Amsterdam toys in silver, the Antwerp incunables, and the famous tenth-century illuminated manuscript in half-uncials! Such trifles ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... isolation. After a short time would come weariness and a void, therefore why had he reserved nothing for himself, why had he trusted all to the cloister? He had not even known how to arrange the pleasure of entering into himself, he had discovered how to lose the amusement of bric-a-brac, how to extirpate that last satisfaction in the white nakedness of a cell! he no longer held to anything, but lay dismantled, saying, "I have renounced almost all the happiness which might fall to me, and what am I going to put ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... or five different books in different languages and treating of widely different subjects, and not lose sight of the very ends for which one reads. When one reads hurriedly and nervously, having in mind written tests and examinations, one's brain becomes encumbered with a lot of choice bric-a-brac for which there seems to be little use. At the present time my mind is so full of heterogeneous matter that I almost despair of ever being able to put it in order. Whenever I enter the region that was the kingdom of my mind I feel like the proverbial bull in the china shop. A thousand ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... The scrupulous cleanliness of the little room, shut off from sight and sound of the madding crowd, is in itself conducive to direct one's thoughts from the world. The bare interior does not engross one's attention like the innumerable pictures and bric-a-brac of a Western parlor; the presence of kakemono[13] calls our attention more to grace of design than to beauty of color. The utmost refinement of taste is the object aimed at; whereas anything like display is banished with religious horror. The ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... the atelier—the first she had ever been in in her life—disappointed her. She had expected to behold a gorgeous collection of bric-a-brac, according to accounts she had heard of the studios of several celebrated masters. That of Marien was remarkable only for its vast dimensions and its abundance of light. Studies and sketches hung on the walls, were piled one over another in corners, were scattered about everywhere, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... German or Italian palace for the purposes of national reorganization and public weal. At the present instant she was enthroned amid cushions in a corner of the sofa, watching Olivia dispose of such bric-a-brac as had not been ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... Bric-a-brac there was none, although here and there, in the mass of plaster on the floor, gleamed bits of glass and china which might once have been parts of ornaments. Hawkinsite had evidently not been quite as powerful as its inventor had imagined, but it had certainly ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... working condition, but they were packed with costly machinery stolen from French and Belgian factories. Her very churches were adorned with masterpieces of art from plundered cathedrals of Western Europe and innumerable private homes possessed articles of furniture and bric-a-brac stolen from wrecked homes in France and Belgium, before they were totally destroyed. War on the part of Germany in the invaded territories of the ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... typical bronze vases from the Society of Engineers of Japan, and a striking desk-set of writing apparatus from Krupp, all the pieces being made out of tiny but massive guns and shells of Krupp steel. In addition to such bric-a-brac and bibelots of all kinds are many pictures and photographs, including the original sketches of the reception given to Edison in 1889 by the Paris Figaro, and a letter from Madame Carnot, placing ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... to treat her as you do. You make her an equal. Her room is one of the best and filled with books and bric-a-brac. She sometimes eats with ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... common mistake parents and loving friends often make in meeting the uncomfortable assertions of the child's will. When the child cries for the moon, you try to get him interested in a jack-in-the-box; and when he wants a fragile piece of bric-a-brac— you try to substitute for it a tin whistle. With a very young child, that is about all you can do. But a time comes when the child is old enough to know the difference between that upon which he has set his heart and that which you ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... the mirror, where she could see the face of the one who alone could retain her presence of mind under the circumstances suggested by Mr. Horace. She could also have seen, had she wished it, among the reflected bric-a-brac of the mantel, the corner of the frame that held the picture of her husband, but peradventure, classing it with the past which held so many unavenged bad dinners, she never thought to link it even ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... thought the stock needed "brightening," so she induced her father to make purchases of several new articles, which she presented the girls as her share of the donations. And Peter Conant, finding many small pieces of jewelry, silverware and bric-a-brac among the accumulation, rented a big showcase for the girls, in which such wares were ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... wings, and still making an effort to fly, but the dancer is laughing with a satanical air. Moral: Love conquered by the colic. This platter, which is very curious, and which had, possibly, the honor of furnishing Moliere with an idea, was still in existence in September, 1845; it was for sale by a bric-a-brac merchant ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo |
