Drawing Room Quotes & Sayings

Bells rang, the stewards rushed forward, and - like rye shaken together in a shovel - the guests who had been scattered about in different rooms came together and crowded in the large drawing-room by the door of the ballroom. — Leo Tolstoy

I'm very artistic - I feel like ever since I was born I've been drawing. I actually have a picture in my room that I painted, and people are always like "Where did you buy that?" It's cool that people are impressed by it. — Maddie Ziegler

Taking Beatrix's gloved hand in his, Christopher lifted it and pressed a kiss to the back of her wrist. He wanted to carry her away from the crowded drawing room and have her all to himself.
"Soon," Beatrix whispered, as if she had read his thoughts, and he let his gaze caress her. "And don't look at me like that," she added. "It makes my knees wobbly."
"Then I won't tell you what I'd like to do with you right now. Because you'd topple over like a ninepin. — Lisa Kleypas

Then the house had been boldly planned with a ball-room, so that, instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as at the Chiverses') one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed drawing-rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d'or), seeing from afar the many-candled lustres reflected in the polished parquetry, and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where camellias and tree-ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo. — Edith Wharton

I awoke some hours later to Hayes's body sliding up against mine, his arm wrapping around my waist, drawing me into his warmth. Like being in a womb. His breath soft at the back of my neck.

"You came back to me," his lips buzzed my ear.

"Of course I did. Liam."

He laughed.

"Wait. Whose room is this?"

"Mr. Marchand's."

"Crap. I might be in the wrong room."

He smiled, rolling me over to face him. "Hiiii."

"Hi."

"You want to come to an August Moon concert with me tonight?"

"It depends..." I said.

"It depends?"

"Do I have good seats?"

His finger was tracing my cheekbone. "You can sit on my face."

"Okay. In that case I'll come. — Robinne Lee

No words for the passion. No words for the need.No words for the sheer epiphany of the moment.And so, on an otherwise unremarkable Friday afternoon, in the heart of Mayfair, in a quiet drawing room on Mount Street, Colin Bridgerton kissed Penelope Featherington.And it was glorious. — Julia Quinn

Offstage, she fixed him in place with compliments and ironic bossiness, and he tended not to look at her at all when they spoke. He was the only one in the band she called by name, implying a permanence to his position that was professionally reassuring but personally debilitating. When they wrote together or when one presented the other with something prepared in private, with no audience to absorb the excess, he felt the room crowding with their other selves, lives unled and correspondences unwritten, happiness opted against, and he could not believe she did not see it, too. He sweated to ornament her fears and tall tales and fake portraits, and with the remnants of his energy he hid the rest of himself from her. The best of him was a child's drawing of her on an off day. — Arthur Phillips

For the time being you, too, are toying, out of despair, with your magazine articles and drawing-room discussions without believing in your own dialectics and smirking at them with your heart aching inside you — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

As soon as the garage door lowered, he slid his hand into her hair, drawing her in for another kiss. Her mouth tasted like sweet brandy and spice. Damn, she was delicious.

She ran her hands down his chest and tugged his shirt free from his jeans. He groaned as her cool hands explored his bare abs. His other hand wandered up from her waist, enjoying her curves until he was cupping her breast. She moaned into his mouth and arched her back into his touch, and he just about lost it right there.

He pulled back, his voice a husky whisper. "I need more room and fewer clothes. — Lisa Kessler

As the family sat in the drawing room after their nuncheon, — Mary Robinette Kowal

You remind me of an old cat I once had. Whenever he killed a mouse he would bring it into the drawing-room and lay it affectionately at my feet. I would reject the corpse with horror and turn him out, but back he would come with his loathsome gift. I simply couldn't make him understand that he was not doing me a kindness. He thought highly of his mouse and it was beyond him to realize that I did not want it.
You are just the same with your chivalry. It's very kind of you to keep offering me your dead mouse; but honestly I have no use for it. I won't take favors just because I happen to be a female. — P.G. Wodehouse

Self-confidence depends on environment: one does not speak in the same tone in the drawing room than in the kitchen. — Gustave Flaubert

There is no room for a complainer in a universe of law, and worry is soul-suicide. By your very attitude of mind you are strengthening the chains which bind you, and are drawing about you the darkness by which you are enveloped, Alter your outlook upon life, and your outward life will alter. — James Allen

Certain persons are malicious solely through a necessity for talking. Their conversation, the chat of the drawing-room, gossip of the anteroom, is like those chimneys which consume wood rapidly; they need a great amount of combustibles; and their combustibles are furnished by their neighbors. — Victor Hugo

From the drawing-room window I see pass almost daily an old gentleman with white hair, a firm step, broad shoulders, healthy pink skin, a sunny smile - always singing to himself as he goes - a happy, rosy-cheeked old fellow, with a rosy-cheeked mind I should like to throw mud at him. — W.N.P. Barbellion

How can you love me?" she asked, forcing herself to say the words that would kill the tenderness in his eyes. "You don't even know me. You know 'Lady Agatha,' a composite, a character, a role I played."

He shook his head, his negation gentle but certain. "I didn't fall in love with a character, a title, or an occupation. I didn't fall in love with you because of your past or despite it.
"I love you because of your intensity and passion, because you make me want to be better than I am, because seeing my reflection in your eyes makes me better than I am. I love you because you laugh easily and honestly. I love you because you carried an ugly mutt into a drawing room as though it were a prince and because you gave an old soldier a strawberry trifle. I love you, Letty. — Connie Brockway

I read up all about bishops in our anarchist pamphlets, in Superstition the Vampire and Priests of Prey. I certainly understood from them that bishops are strange and terrible old men keeping a cruel secret from mankind. I was misinformed. When on my first appearing in episcopal gaiters in a drawing-room I cried out in a voice of thunder, 'Down! down! presumptuous human reason!' they found out in some way that I was not a bishop at all. — G.K. Chesterton

My interior is very, very dense - Proustian-looking, sort of Henry James. The walls are covered in pictures, and I transformed the big drawing room into a library lined with books. — Hamish Bowles

I was wondering if the scene in the drawing-room had been a triumph or a disaster or merely a chaotic piece of bad taste verging on bathos, but I reflected that the only important question was whether I had communicated my message to my parents. I continued to smoke my cigarette and occasionally I shuddered. I wondered dimly how anyone ever survived their families. — Susan Howatch

SIR BARNET and Lady Skettles, very good people, resided in a pretty villa at Fulham, on the banks of the Thames; which was one of the most desirable residences in the world when a rowing-match happened to be going past, but had its little inconveniences at other times, among which may be enumerated the occasional appearance of the river in the drawing-room, and the contemporaneous disappearance of the lawn and shrubbery. — Charles Dickens

But after all, what have we to do with taverns? Real menace belongs to the drawing-room. — E. M. Forster

And to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to mind with ambiguous alterations
sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door. — J. Sheridan Le Fanu

The said Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round their mama in the drawing-room: she lay reclined on a sofa by the fireside, and with her darlings about her (for the time neither quarrelling nor crying) looked perfectly — Charlotte Bronte

A man is skillful at woodraft just in proportion as he approaches this balance. Knowing the wilderness can be comfortable when a less experienced man would endure hardship. Conversely, if a man endures hardships where a woodsman could be comfortable, it argues not his toughness, but his ignorance or foolishness, which is exactly the case with our blatant friend of the drawing-room reputation. — Stewart Edward White

They moved from the drawing room to a dining room on the ground floor where they found spiders large as saucers lurking in the dresser (Ron left the room hurriedly to make a cup of tea and did not return for an hour and a half) — J.K. Rowling

It had a small park, with a fine old oak here and there, and an avenue of limes towards the southwest front, with a sunk fence between park and pleasure-ground, so that from the drawing-room windows the glance swept uninterruptedly along a slope of greensward till the limes ended in a level of corn and pastures, which often seemed to melt into a lake under the setting sun. — George Eliot

Many a woman will pass for elegant in a ballroom, or even at a court drawing room, whose want of true breeding would become evident in a chosen company. — Julia Ward Howe

In the drawing room [of the Queen's palace] hung a Venus and Cupid by Michaelangelo, in which, instead of a bit of drapery, the painter has placed Cupid's foot between Venus's thighs. Queen Caroline asked General Guise, an old connoisseur, if it was not a very fine piece? He replied Madam, the painter was a fool, for he has placed the foot where the hand should be. — Horace Walpole

His love for me seemed to overflow my limits by its flood of wealth and service. But my necessity was more for giving than foe receiving; for love is a vagabond, who can make his flowers bloom in the wayside dust, better than in the crystal jars kept in the drawing-room. — Rabindranath Tagore

Baby Kochamma had installed a dish antenna on the roof of the Ayemenem house. She presided over the world in her drawing room on satellite TV. The impossible excitement that this engendered in Baby Kochamma wasn't hard to understand. It wasn't something that happened gradually. It happened overnight. Blondes, wars, famines, football, sex, music, coups d'etat - they all arrived on the same train. They unpacked together. They stayed at the same hotel. And in Ayemenem, where once the loudest sound had been a musical bus horn, now whole wars, famines, picturesque massacres and Bill Clinton could be summoned up like servants. — Arundhati Roy

A breathless laugh escaped her, and she let her head rest back on his arm as his mouth traveled to the side of her neck. "When shall we negotiate?" she asked, surprised by the throatiness of her own voice.
"Tonight. You'll come to my room."
She gave him a skeptical glance. "This wouldn't be a ruse to lure me into a situation in which you would take unscrupulous advantage of me?"
Drawing back to look at her, Marcus answered gravely. "Of course not. I intend to have a meaningful discussion that will put to rest any doubts you may have about marrying me."
"Oh."
"And then I'm going to take unscrupulous advantage of you."
-Lillian & Marcus — Lisa Kleypas

Eliminating Charles from everything he had touched was almost impossible, but it seemed to me that if I altered our father's room, and perhaps later the kitchen and the drawing room and the study, and even finally the garden, Charles would be lost, shut off from what he recognized, and would have to concede that this was not the house he had come to visit and so would go away. — Shirley Jackson

Next came the drawing room and Abigail stared in surprise. It appeared as though the occupants had just been called away. A tea set sat on the round table, cups encrusted with dry tea. A book lay open over the arm of the sofa. A needlework project, nearly finished, lay trapped under an overturned chair. What had happened here? Why had the family left so abruptly, and why had the rooms been entombed for almost two decades? — Julie Klassen

It's what I call common sense, properly understood,' replied Father Brown. 'It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don't understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it's only incredible. But I'm much more certain it didn't happen than that Parnell's ghost didn't appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand. So it is with that tale of the curse. It isn't the legend that I disbelieve - it's the history. — G.K. Chesterton

Wait: His boyfriend? He was gay? The focus on the lens sharpened, and I could see it clearly now. Of course he was gay. Everyone could see that, except the chubby little lonely heart sitting at seven o'clock, drawing sparkly rainbows on the page with her glitter crayons. I was still beating myself up when the round robin arrived to me, and I sputtered along trying to assemble some phony epiphany with strong verbs, but tears dripped down my face.
The room fell into silence as people waited for me to explain. But what could I possibly say? That I had just discovered my future husband was gay? That I was going to live the rest of my life surrounded by nothing but empty lasagna pans and an overloved cat destined to die before me?
"I'm sorry," I finally said. "I was just reminded of something very painful." And I guess that wasn't a lie. — Sarah Hepola

He walked across the room and flicked a switch. A spotlight turned on, illuminating a laminated poster of a woman on his wall. He took a crayon from his pocket and began drawing on it. I could see smudges from past demonstrations. [. . .] His dashed lines crisscrossed the woman's chest as if he were planning a military maneuver on undulating terrain. — Kim Van Alkemade

The man in Drawing Room B, Car No. 4, was a newspaper publisher who believed that men are evil by nature and unfit for freedom, that their basic interests, if left unchecked, are to lie, to rob and to murder one another - and, therefore, men must be ruled by means of lies, robbery and murder, which must be made the exclusive privilege of the rulers, for the purpose of forcing men to work, teaching them to be moral and keeping them within the bounds of order and justice. — Ayn Rand

While reading the Times of India each morning, my father spares a minute for the cartoon by R. K. Laxman. While my mother is, like a magician, making untidy sheets disappear in the bedroom and producing fresh towels in the bathroom, or braving bad weather in the kitchen, my father, in the extraordinary Chinese calm of the drawing-room, is dmiring the cartoon by R. K. Laxman, and, if my mother happens to be there, unselfishly sharing it with her. She, as expected, misunderstands it completely, laughing not at the joke but at the expressions on the faces of the caricatures, and at the hilarious fact that they talk to each other like human beings. — Amit Chaudhuri

I like charcoal drawing a lot. I'm not very good, but I always find myself buying canvases and paints whenever I'm on location, because I always have this ambition to fill the hotel room I'm in and turn it into an art studio. — Ben Schnetzer

And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally this is so. Yet is it the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are "important"; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes "trivial." And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. — Virginia Woolf

Forgive me if I never visit. I am from the fields, you know, and while quite at home with the dandelions, make a sorry figure in a drawing room. — Emily Dickinson

The issue of comparative performances can be regarded as settled to-day, both scientifically and practically. Though differences in attitudes between men and women still form a favorite topic of drawing-room conversation ... women's abilities are no longer seriously in doubt. These discussions rather seem to be a kind of rearguard action carried on after the main battle has been decided. — Alva Myrdal

When he entered the drawing-room she was sitting alone, in a large, low chair, made without arms, so as to admit the full expansion of her dress, but hollowed and rounded at the back, so as to afford her the support that was necessary to her. She had barely spoke three words since she had left the dining-room, but the time had not passed heavily with her. — Anthony Trollope

How glorious to be introduced in a drawing room to a Lady who reads Novels, with "Mr. So-and-so - Miss So-and-so; Miss So-and-so, this is Mr So-and-so, who fell off a precipice and was half-drowned." Now I refer to you, whether I should lose so fine an opportunity of making my fortune. No romance lady could resist me - none. — John Keats

Despite the other men and women in the crowded room, Nate felt as if Adam played for him. Only for him. Blood pounded through his veins, his cock drawing tight beneath the unforgiving denim of the faded jeans he wore. It was the same every time Adam played his saxophone or sang in that smoky voice of his. Intense arousal surged through Nate's mind along with confusion. How could one man make him feel this way? So lost. So incredibly aroused. So damn needy. — Shelley Munro

Half an hour later, Harry and Ron, who had dressed and breakfasted quickly, entered the drawing room, — J.K. Rowling

She believed in public service; she felt she had to roll up her sleeves and do something useful for the war effort. She organized a Comfort Circle, which collected money through rummage sales. This was spent on small boxes containing tobacco and candies, which were sent off to the trenches. She threw open Avilion for these functions, which (said Reenie) was hard on the floors. In addition to the rummage sales, every Tuesday afternoon her group knitted for the troops, in the drawing room
washcloths for the beginners, scarves for the intermediates, balaclavas and gloves for the experts. Soon another battalion of recruits was added, on Thursdays
older, less literate women from south of the Jogues who could knit in their sleep. These made baby garments for the Armenians, said to be starving, and for something called Overseas Refugees. After two hours of knitting, a frugal tea was served in the dining room, with Tristan and Iseult looking wanly down. — Margaret Atwood

I know the world is a drawing-room, from which we must retire politely and honestly; that is, with a bow, and our debts of honor paid. — Alexandre Dumas

This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution. — Edvard Munch

The piano is the social instrument par excellence ... drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment. — Jacques Barzun

TV was entertainment of the last resort. There was nothing on during the day in the summer other than game shows and soap operas. Besides, a TV-watching child was considered available for chores: take out the trash, clean your room, pick up that mess, fold those towels, mow the lawn ... the list was endless. We all became adept at chore-avoidance. Staying out of sight was a reliable strategy. Drawing or painting was another: to my mother, making art trumped making beds. A third choir-avoidance technique was to read. A kid with his or her nose in a book is a kid who is not fighting, yelling, throwing, breaking things, bleeding, whining, or otherwise creating a Mom-size headache. Reading a book was almost like being invisible - a good thing for all concerned. — Pete Hautman

One time I covered a wall with 8.5x11 pages of drawings, which made things feel a little bit different in the room. — Jason Polan

Acting must be scaled down for the screen. A drawing room is a lot smaller than a theatre auditorium. — Arthur Lowe

It is, however, not to the museum, or the lecture-room, or the drawing- school, but to the library, that we must go for the completion of our humanity. It is books that bear from age to age the intellectual wealth of the world. — Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl Of Lytton

There are many nations that have perfected a particular room. You know, you have the French drawing-room, the Austrian ball room, the German dining room, and I think the library is a room the English get right. — Julian Fellowes

She was a masterpiece of composure; nothing ever ruffled her or made her upset, and though she was not beautiful her calmness had the magnetic pull of beauty- a stillness so powerful that the molecules realigned themselves around her when she came into a room. Like a fashion drawing come to life, she turned heads wherever she went, gliding along obliviously without appearing to notice the turbulence she created in her wake. — Donna Tartt

Sharing a room with the person you want most is like sharing a room with an open fire.
He's constantly drawing you in. And you're constantly stepping too close. And you know it's not good
that there is no good
that there's absolutely nothing that can ever come of it.
But you do it anyway.
And then ...
Well. Then you burn. — Rainbow Rowell

Mr. Denham cursed himself very sharply for having exchanged the freedom of the street for this sophisticated drawing-room, — Virginia Woolf

For the woman who swelters in her kitchen or lolls in a drawing room, for the man who sits half his life in an office chair, an occasional swim does as much good as six months' vacation. That weary feeling goes away for once in the cool, quiet water. Tired men and tired women forget that stocks and cakes have fallen. — Lynn Sherr

I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies. — Le Corbusier

He was said to ride hallooing through the night, to be ready to shoot, hunt, or swim anywhere in any weather, to be able to drink half a dozen young lieutenants from nearby garrisons under the table, to wake up his occasional guests by firing a pistol through their bedroom windows, to have seduced every peasant girl in all the villages, to have released a fox in a lady's drawing room. — Robert K. Massie

But she feared time itself, and read on Lady Bruton's face, as if it had been a dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was sliced; how little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the colours, salts, tones of existence, so that she filled the room she entered, and felt often as she stood hesitating one moment on the threshold of her drawing-room, an exquisite suspense, such as might stay a diver before plunging while the sea darkens and brightens beneath him, and the waves which threaten to break, but only gently split their surface, roll and conceal and encrust — Virginia Woolf

We have entered a new and different world-richly interconnected and radically multicentric-in which the traditional holders of power have to move over and make room for new stakeholders, new players, and new leaders of many kinds. Nobody in Charge, drawing on the learnings of a wise and widely experienced public executive, offers some priceless insights into how things have changed, where they are now, and where we may be going next in this bewildering terrain. — Walter Truett Anderson

Was it? I said cautiously, it having been my occasional habit to watch television in the drawing room without the encumbrance of trousers. — Paul Murray

I've given up my living room, guest room, job, career, heterosexuality and my stance on no pets in the house, but I'm not giving up my room. I'm drawing a line. — Dani Alexander

Tom was not. "Seems to me," he said, "that she's at her drawing board evenings more than she's watching TV, and that you're the one who uses the sitting room for — Barbara Delinsky

And so, on an otherwise unremarkable Friday afternoon, in the heart of Mayfair, in a quiet drawing room on Mount Street, Colin Bridgerton kissed Penelope Featherington. — Julia Quinn

Six years previously, Miss Brodie had led her new class into the garden for a history lesson underneath the big elm. On the way through the school corridors they passed the headmistress's study. The door was wide open, the room was empty.
'Little girls,' said Miss Brodie, 'come and observe this.'
They clustered round the open door while she pointed to a large poster pinned with drawing-pins on the opposite wall within the room. It depicted a man's big face. Underneath were the words 'Safety First'.
'This is Stanley Baldwin who got in as Prime Minister and got out again ere long,' said Miss Brodie. 'Miss Mackay retains him on the wall because she believes in the slogan "Safety First". But Safety does not come first. Goodness, Truth and Beauty come first. Follow me. — Muriel Spark

After all the field of battle possesses many advantages over the drawing-room. There at least is no room for pretension or excessive ceremony, no shaking of hands or rubbing of noses, which make one doubt your sincerity, but hearty as well as hard hand-play. It at least exhibits one of the faces of humanity, the former only a mask. — Henry David Thoreau

Let's go back to the train station,' she said. 'Or,
rather, let's come back to this room, to the day when we sat here together for the first time
and you recognised that I existed and gave me a gift. That was your first attempt to enter my
soul, and you weren't sure whether or not you were welcome. But, as you say in your story,
human beings were
once divided and now seek the embrace that will reunite them. That is our instinct. But it is
also our reason for putting
up with all the difficulties we meet in that search.I want you to look at me, but I want you to take care
that I don't notice. Initial desire is important because it is hidden, forbidden, not permitted.
You don't know whether you are looking at your lost half or not; she doesn't know either,
but something is drawing you together, and you must believe that it is true you are each
other's other half — Paulo Coelho

There's always room out there for the hand-drawn image. I personally like the imperfection of hand drawing as opposed to the slick look of computer animation. But you can do good stuff either way. The Pixar movies are amazing in what they do, but there's plenty of independent animators who are doing really amazing things as well. — Matt Groening

We spend January 1st walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives ... not looking for flaws, but for potential. — Ellen Goodman

Seating themselves on the greensward, they eat while the corks fly and there is talk, laughter and merriment, and perfect freedom, for the universe is their drawing room and the sun their lamp. Besides, they have appetite, Nature's special gift, which lends to such a meal a vivacity unknown indoors, however beautiful the surroundings. — Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Mathilde returned and strolled past the drawing-room windows; she saw him busily engaged in describing to Madame de Fervaques the old ruined castles that crown the steep banks of the Rhine and give them so distinctive a character. He was beginning to acquit himself none too badly in the use of the sentimental and picturesque language which is called wit in certain drawing-rooms. — Stendhal

A breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room, I slipped in there. It contained a bookcase: I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care that it should be one stored with pictures. I mounted into the window-seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double retirement. Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon. Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast. I — Charlotte Bronte

No, what was sad in his case was that he, who didn't care for carved oak, should have his drawing-room panelled with it, while people who do care for it have to pay enormous prices to get it. It seems to be the rule of this world. — Jerome K. Jerome

In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighborhood (but not too well-to-do-or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet."

(The guilty vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict, Harper's Magazine, May 1948) — W. H. Auden

Prince Bolkonsky was of medium height, a rather handsome young man with well-defined and dry features. Everything in his figure, from his weary, bored gaze to his quiet, measured gait, presented the sharpest contrast with his small, lively wife. Obviously, he not only knew everyone in the drawing room, but was also so sick of them that it was very boring for him to look at them and listen to them. Of all the faces he found so boring, the face of his pretty wife seemed to be the one he was most sick of. With a grimace that spoiled his handsome face, he turned away from her. He kissed Anna Pavlovna's hand and, narrowing his eyes, looked around at the whole company. — Leo Tolstoy

He looked up and saw her and his breath stopped in his throat. His hands stopped too, still spread above the keyboard. Harpsichord notes do not carry, and in the sudden quiet of the drawing room they both heard him take his next breath. — Thomas Harris

This is not exactly what I had in mind when I agreed to miss lunch," Alex said grumpily forty minutes later. He shifted uncomfortably and tried to see what I was doing.
I stared him back into submission. "Wait."
The art room is usually empty Thursday afternoons except for me. Ms. Evers leaves early to teach her UArts class and looks up.Of course, I am one of the few entrusted with the Secret Location of the Key.
A few feet away from where I sat perched on a stool,Alex was posed on the anchient chaise we use for figure drawing. It's a relic, probably from the Palladinetti years: chipped mahogany and dusty velvet, what little remaining stuffing pokes out from a century of holes. I was probably luxurious once. Now it's like sitting on a slightly smelly board. But I'd wanted to sketch Alex as I so often saw him, reclining with his head propped on one hand,listening or talking or coaxing me to put down the glass, already,Ella,and come here. — Melissa Jensen

I suddenly see the world
as no longer viable:
you are out there burning the crops
with some new sublimate
This morning you left the bed
we still share
and went out to spread impotence
upon the world

I hate you.
I hate the mask you wear, your eyes
assuming a depth
they do not possess, drawing me
into the grotto of your skull
the landscape of bone
I hate your words
they make you think of fake
revolutionary bills
crisp imitation parchment
they sell at battlefields.

Last night, in this room, weeping
I asked you: what are you feeling?
do you feel anything?
Now in the torsion of your body
as you defoliate the fields we lived from
I have your answer. — Adrienne Rich

How much did he charge you?" he asked, intending to add that amount to her allowance.
"Originally he wanted $1,000 whether he finds news of Robert or not. But I offered to pay him twice his fee if he's successful."
"And if he isn't?"
"Oh, in that case I didn't think it was fair that he receive anything," she said. "I persuaded him I was right."
Ian's shout of laughter was still ringing in the hall when they entered the drawing room to greet the Townsendes. — Judith McNaught

An animatic is a process where every voice and every sound effect is added to rough animated drawings and it lasts exactly as long as the final movie. So you actually get to go into a screening room with the rest of the cast and you get to see it all at the same time. — Tom Hanks

It was evident that he not only knew everyone in the drawing room, but had found them to be so tiresome that it wearied him to look at or listen to them. — Leo Tolstoy

The great are deceived if they imagine they have appropriated ambition and vanity to themselves. These notable qualities flourish as notably in a country church and churchyard as in the drawing room or in the closet. Schemes have indeed been laid in the vestry, which would hardly disgrace the conclave. Here is a ministry, and here is an opposition. Here are plots and circumventions, parties and factions equal to those which are to be found in courts. Nor are the women here less practiced in the highest feminine arts than their fair superiors in quality and fortune. Here are prudes and coquettes; here are dressing and ogling, falsehood, envy, malice, scandal -- in short everything which is common to the most splendid assembly or politest circle. — Henry Fielding

...so I took it out with me into the garden, because the dullest book takes on a certain saving grace if read out of doors, just as bread and butter, devoid of charm in the drawing-room, is ambrosia eaten under a tree. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

Now the moon is high; and the great house, needing habitation more than ever, is like a body without life. Now it is even awful, stealing through it, to think of the live people who have slept in the solitary bedrooms, to say nothing of the dead. Now is the time for shadow, when every corner is a cavern and every downward step a pit, when the stained glass is reflected in pale and faded hues upon the floors, when anything and everything can be made of the heavy staircase beams excepting their own proper shapes, when the armour has dull lights upon it not easily to be distinguished from stealthy movement, and when barred helmets are frightfully suggestive of heads inside. But of all the shadows in Chesney Wold, the shadow in the long drawing-room upon my Lady's picture is the first to come, the last to be disturbed. At this hour and by this light it changes into threatening hands raised up and menacing the handsome face with every breath that stirs. — Charles Dickens

No man is quite so much a hero in the dark as in broad daylight, in solitude as in society, in the gloom of the churchyard as in the blaze of the drawing-room. The season and the place may be such as to oppress the stoutest heart with a mysterious awe, which, if not fear, is near akin to it. — William H. Prescott

But I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes. — Edith Wharton

They always left the thermos full, ready for their return home. The five minutes devoted to that small late-night feast made them feel rather special, as if they had suddenly left the mediocrity of their lives behind them and risen a few rungs on the economic ladder. The kitchen disappeared and gave way to an intimate little drawing room with expensive furniture and paintings on the wall and a piano in one corner. — Jose Saramago

Forget your pain. It was what I said when I took Father's hand in the drawing room yesterday, what I repeated again tonight. But I didn't mean this. I must be careful. Yet what bothers me isn't the power of the magic or how, to a person, they've all accepted it as truth. No, what unsettles me the most is how much I want to believe it too. — Libba Bray

Felicity grabbed onto a broken roof beam for support. It was strange, standing in the middle of where the drawing room used to be, and seeing her broken bedchamber furniture occupying the same space. She wanted to cry every time she looked at the rubble, but weeping wouldn't help her dig out her jewelry box or the books piled in the wreck of the library. — Suzanne Enoch

I was quiet, a loner. I was one of those children where, if you put me in a room and gave me some crayons and a pencils, you wouldn't hear from me for nine straight hours. And I was always drawing racing cars and rockets and spaceships and planes, things that were very fast that would take me away. — Gary Oldman

He was one of the masters of the thriller and he really was one of the great signposts, because he took the spy thriller out of the gentility of the drawing room and into the back streets of Istanbul and where it all really happened, ... The Day of the Jackal. — Frederick Forsyth

Never, never marry, my friend. Here's my advice to you: don't marry until you can tell yourself that you've done all you could, and until you've stopped loving the woman you've chosen, until you see her clearly, otherwise you'll be cruelly and irremediably mistaken. Marry when you're old and good for nothing ... Otherwise all that's good and lofty in you will be lost. It will all go on trifles. Yes, yes, yes! Don't look at me with such astonishment. If you expect something from yourself in the future, then at every step you'll feel that it's all over for you, it's all closed, except the drawing room, where you'll stand on the same level as a court flunkey and an idiot ... — Leo Tolstoy

This was her body. She had learned to take pleasure in it, even if no man had ever done the same. It was curved and generous and womanly and strong, and it was formed to do more than decorate a drawing room, or transfer wealth from one gentleman to another.
She was made to tempt, labor, inspire, create, sustain.
Despite the way Rafe held her bound in his grasp, a sense of power moved through her. For once, she could revel in her femininity and feel it as something other than a disadvantage to be overcome. A quality to be respected, worshiped. Even feared. — Tessa Dare

Now we come to the passage. You can just see a little peep of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing room wide open: and it's very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond. — Francesca Woodman

Long aprons with starch. Off in the drawing room, it sounded like bees buzzing. Missus showed — Sue Monk Kidd

Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing. — George Meredith

But the silent stranger could hardly have understood what was passing: she was a German who had not long been in Russia and knew not a word of Russian, and she seemed to be as stupid as she was handsome. She was a novelty and it had become a fashion to invite her to certain parties, sumptuously attired, with her hair dressed as though for a show, and to seat her in the drawing-room as a charming decoration, just as people sometimes borrow from their friends for a special occasion a picture, a statue, a vase, or a fire-screen. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky