"Waste-paper basket" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it. It's so long ago. If he thought at all of its discovery it was to doubt any other fate for it than a waste-paper basket or a fire. Anything else was too preposterous. But he brooded a lot over the other. The most terrible results of his foolhardy whim Carl pledged me not to tell him. Says the blame is all his and he'll shoulder it. What little we did reveal, horrified ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... day, while the rain poured outside, and peace reigned in her mansion. Coming across the postals, she pondered over them, and then put them carefully away in the drawer labelled 'Boys' Letters', saying to herself, as she bundled eleven requests for autographs into the waste-paper basket: ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... that letter was, for having seen it on her desk he had, without reading it, torn it up and thrown it into the waste-paper basket, thinking the less that remained to remind her of the young ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... he departed to see that Jane, the little maid whom Sarah ordered about, had not, in cleaning the study for the evening's festivities, put his last sermon into the waste-paper basket. His wife looked after him with eyes that ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... creature is up to?' he murmured, as he tore the letter into small fragments, and threw them into the waste-paper basket. ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... When the waste-paper basket had been twice filled with wrappings and twice emptied; when order was emerging out of chaos; when the Christmas-tree had been disclosed and its treasures distributed, a timid hand was laid on ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... disturbed him most were the silence and absence of the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Crombile no longer came to the meetings of the Cabinet. Rising at five o'clock in the morning, he worked eighteen hours at his desk, and at last fell exhausted into his waste-paper basket, from whence the registrars removed him, together with the papers which they were going to sell to the military attaches of the ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... to his snuggery, a mood of listless dejection possessing him. He fidgetted aimlessly with one or two books and papers, filled a pipe, and half filled a waste-paper basket with torn circulars and accumulated writing-table litter. Then he lit the pipe and settled down in his most comfortable armchair with an old note-book in his hand. It was a sort of disjointed diary, running fitfully through the ...
— When William Came • Saki
... that 'personal' vein which has been worked with so much industry in our own day. He took his readers into his confidence, prattled about his japonica and his pastilles, and described his favourite bird, a scarlet trulian, and his dogs, Ugolino and L. E. L., who slept in the waste-paper basket. He professed to write with a bottle of Rudesheimer and a plate of olives at his elbow, and it was hinted that he ate fruit in summer with an amber-handled fork ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... home or his regiment. Possibly the commandant knew why; he used to look at Jim with an evil triumph in his eye which made the boy long to take him by his fat throat and ask him whether indeed his letters ever got farther than the office waste-paper basket. ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... day before she left her room, yet almost as soon as she had descended in the lift the head femme de chambre, a stout Frenchwoman in a frilled cap, entered the room, and walking straight to the waste-paper basket gathered up the contents into her apron and went back along the corridor with an expression of satisfaction upon ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... is fortunate, seeing that I have this big place to attend to." And as he said this he rose, screwed up the sheet of thin note-paper, and tossed it into the waste-paper basket. ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... usually waste my time," Peter Ruff reminded her, mildly, "by giving you down communications destined for the waste-paper basket." ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... useless correspondence, clearing desks, drawers, pigeon-holes of the accumulations of years, unconsciously preparing for the day of his discharge. It kept his thoughts employed, and he worked hard—reading through the dusty papers, tearing them up, consigning some to the waste-paper basket others to the fire, which by-and-by grew sullen under its task. Twilight fell.... She would come, then, after dusk, and secretly—mooring her boat in the hiding-place under the Keg of Butter Battery, away from inquisitive eyes. At ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... in my case it didn't happen so. The day my three years' term was up, a beautiful spring day, the junior partner informed me that I could consider myself finished, and handed me a reference that, for all the use it was, might have gone into the waste-paper basket then and there. ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... looked up with an impatient ejaculation "Give it to me," he said in some annoyance, snatching it away from her and throwing it into the waste-paper basket. "Here, this is the one. Read it; read it quickly; for we ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... wouldn't you really mind if I tore it into little bits and put it in the waste-paper basket—just as ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... furnished the desired information. She brought out a piece of paper as she spoke, and passed it on to her friend behind the cover of her open desk. It was a fragment of one of Maysie's zoological drawing-sheets, evidently picked up out of the waste-paper basket—a wasp with wings outspread, showing the three divisions of an insect's body. The head was roughly altered so as to form a caricature of a human face, and above was printed, in letters that might have done credit to Maysie herself: "Miss E. in a tantrum," and below: "How doth ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... slept in. In the waste-paper basket the district attorney found something which he held up in a significant silence. Macdonald stepped forward and took from him ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... and his mother, from Edinburgh. That he tore up the mysterious letter in his bedroom, and (finding no means immediately at hand for burning it) that he threw the fragments into the empty grate, or into the waste-paper basket, seems to be the most reasonable conclusion that we can draw from what we know. In any case, he would not have much time to think about it. Everything was done in a hurry on that day. Eustace and his mother, accompanied by Dexter, left for England the same ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... time. Perhaps the censor, trained as he must have been in the art of reading dangerous meanings into seemingly harmless sentences, decided in his own mind that it would be advisable to keep the information about the measles to himself, and consigned the letter to the waste-paper basket. ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... two votes for the army," remarked MacShaughnassy, as Brown tore his sister's letter in two, and threw the pieces into the waste-paper basket. "What says the ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... the Wise Men being led by a moving heavenly body, traveling across the skies and at last standing still over the cottage of Joseph, with which the Sunday school books are filled, must be relegated to the same waste-paper basket which contains the Bible illustrations, formerly so popular, which picture Jehovah as a bald-headed old man with a long white beard, clad in flowing robes designed to hide his body. Is it any wonder that skeptics, infidels, and scoffers of the spiritual truths have arisen in great numbers, when ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... possessed; and when they parted from you they shuddered back into their nothingness. Where are the plays, where the romances which Maquet and the rest wrote in their own strength? They are forgotten with last year's snows; they have passed into the wide waste-paper basket of the world. You say of D'Artagnan, when severed from his three friends—from Porthos, Athos, and Aramis—"he felt that he could do nothing, save on the condition that each of these companions yielded to him, ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... crying because of some bagatelle, now she was laughing as though nothing had ever happened. The roses her serious and moneyed admirers brought her she picked to pieces in their very presence, and threw the pieces in the waste-paper basket. Doederlein would lecture her in the kindest and most intelligent way on good morals and gentle manners, and she would listen as though she were a saint. Five minutes later she would be hanging out of the window, flirting with ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... "It must be rewritten from end to end. I suppose she must do it herself," he added, with a smile that he drew from some memory of her, and he pulled writing materials toward him to tell her so. Re-reading his brief note, he frowned, hesitated, and tore it up. The next followed it into the waste-paper basket. The third gave Elfrida gently to understand that in Mr. Cardiff's opinion the article was a little unbalanced—she would remember her demand that he should be absolutely frank. She had made some delightful points, but there was a lack of plan and symmetry. If she would give him ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... he also threw this letter into the waste-paper basket, telling himself that birds of that feather very often did ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope |
