"Write about" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have thought of my old friend "Father Payne," as we affectionately called him, I had somehow never intended to write about him, or if I did, it was "like as a dream when one awaketh," a vision that melted away at the touch of common life. Yet I always felt that his was one of those rich personalities well worth depicting, if the attitude and gesture with which he faced the world could be caught ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... write about it beautifully, even if you're not very virile or epigrammatic or passionate. I won't let you ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... tenacity as a fighter. But I shall make amends. It seems when I fished I was steeped in dreams of the sea and the beauty of the lonely islands. I am not in Jump's class as a fisherman, nor in Lone Angler's, either. They stand by themselves. But I can write about ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... naval base dictator held me two weeks in London. While waiting I had a look over the city. It was during a period when the moon was ripe for air-raids. There were seven of them in nine nights. My business in life being to see things and then to write about them, I walked the streets during two of them and viewed some of the others from club and ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... for the issue of our new paper. He has carried the matter through with his usual energy, but he doesn't know enough about local affairs to be able to write about them, and it is a question whether he can interest the people here in anything else. At present we are prepared to run the paper single-handed; we are working seven hours a day at the practice; we are building a stable; and in our odd hours we are practising at our magnetic ship-protector, ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... respecting the precedency of this lady. There is no doubt that, in the county, the high-sheriff takes precedence of every one, even of the lord-lieutenant; but how about his wife? Perhaps your grace could aid me? Mr. Putney Giles said he would write about it to ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... to save time. He couldn't admit it to Scotty, of course, but he was plenty curious in spite of his skepticism. He knew Scotty, and his pal wouldn't get excited over some silly business that Barby might write about. ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... other plans for her future career she had dreams of becoming a writer of books, but her difficulty hitherto had been that the usual sort of book is so ordinary, and she had never been able to think of anything remarkably unusual to write about. The autobiography of a person who could live in various periods of the Christian Era might turn out to be quite interesting, she thought, if only people would believe that it was true. The trouble was that most likely ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... be, it was so. Accordingly the merchant's daughter interested him as a new individual who had faith in him, and also as a fresh opportunity to confirm his healing powers and enhance his fame. 'They bring people a thousand versts and write about it in the papers. The Emperor knows of it, and they know of it in Europe, in unbelieving Europe'—thought he. And suddenly he felt ashamed of his vanity and again began to pray. 'Lord, King of Heaven, Comforter, Soul of Truth! ...
— Father Sergius • Leo Tolstoy
... because the trees were too crowded. The varieties of black walnuts I first experimented with were the Thomas, Ohio, Stabler and Ten Eyck, which were planted by hundreds year after year. If I had not worked on this large scale there would be no reason for me to write about it today as the mortality of these black walnuts was so high that probably none would have lived to induce in me the ambition necessary to support a plan involving lengthy, systematic experimentation. Some of these early trees survive today, however, and although few in number, they have ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke
... to be an achievement unprecedented. Merely to write about it and to try to convey a sense of its quality is a privilege. I have valued it all the more because I know that many people, not trained in matters of architecture and art, are striving to relate ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... undertook to write about Inger Gyldenloeve, he was but little acquainted with the particulars of her history. He conceived her, as he found her in the incomplete chronicles he consulted, as a Matriarch, a wonderful and heroic elderly woman around whom all the hopes of an embittered patriotism were legitimately centred. ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... man you used to write about had seemed to be just what you liked, you'd have waited to know if he wanted you, before you ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... eyes and distended jaws, tearing the vitals from the crushed and robbed city, while Tweed and his associates sat enthroned.[1339] "Let's stop those damned pictures," proposed Tweed when he saw it. "I don't care so much what the papers write about me—my constituents can't read; but they ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... immediateness and infinity of meaning and power, which made them, though the same words he had looked on from childhood, other and greater and deeper words. He then left the ordinary commentators, and men who write about meanings and flutter around the circumference and corners; he was bent on the centre, on touching with his own fingers, on seeing with his own eyes, the pearl of great price. Then it was that he began to dig into the depths, into the primary and auriferous rock of Scripture, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... I don't know how to write about it! I can't write about it! My heart goes down like a freight elevator, slowly, sickeningly, even when I think about it. Dinky-Dunk came in and saw me studying a little row of dates written on the wall-paper beside the ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... woman, constitutes a fine capital for the increase of future business. But to have been born lucky is much more exciting than to have been born beautiful; moreover the capital reserve does not diminish with time. All the same, I don't want to write about either lucky people or beautiful ones. There are already too many people writing about them as it is. I want to write about the unlucky ones—because I consider myself one of them. I do so in the hope that my tears will find their tears, and, it we must drown, metaphorically ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... view, I have never seen a good painting in my life. I can only say this, though—that it has always weighed on my mind as a great and sore deprivation, this being shut out from knowing what others mean when they talk and write about art. Perhaps that may help you to get at what you are after. If I ever went to New York, I feel that one of the first things I should do would be to see all the picture galleries; is that what you meant? And—would ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... which he refers and try them by his standard. Is not all literature passing into criticism, just as Athenian literature in the age of Plato was degenerating into sophistry and rhetoric? We can discourse and write about poems and paintings, but we seem to have lost the gift of creating them. Can we wonder that few of them 'come sweetly from nature,' while ten thousand reviewers (mala murioi) are engaged in dissecting ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... book is based on lectures, often of an informal nature, in the Appreciation Course at Harvard University and lays no claim to original research. The difficulty in establishing points of approach makes it far more baffling to speak or write about music than about the other arts. Music is sufficient unto itself. Endowed with the insight of a Ruskin or a Pater, one may say something worth while about painting. But in music the line between mere statistical analysis and sentimental rhapsody must be drawn with exceeding care. ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... attitude of mine would give me merely externals, which are not worth writing about. I go places merely because for one reason or another they attract me. Then if it happens that I get close enough to the life, I may later find that I have something to write about. A man rarely writes anything convincing unless he has lived the life; not with his critical faculty alert, but whole-heartedly and because, for the time being, it ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... a first letter, three pages long, with an account of her crossing; while to you she can write about fashions, and how the bonnets are worn in Paris, and all sorts of interesting things. But poor mothers must never expect confidential letters, ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... its publication the author was thirty-six years old, many of the poems must have been written in the twenties. The style is mature, but the constant dwelling on death and the grave is a mark of youth. Young poets love to write about death, because its contrast to their present condition forms a romantic tragedy, sharply dramatic and yet instinctively felt to be remote. Tennyson's first volume is full of the details of dissolution, the falling jaw, the eye-balls fixing, ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... sweet American girl, and not one of these nasty foreigners.' Unluckily she couldn't, at the moment, put her hand on a sweet American; but she presently heard of Miss Viner through the Farlows, an excellent couple who live in the Quartier Latin and write about French life for the American papers. I was only too thankful to find anyone who was vouched for by decent people; and so far I've had no cause to regret my choice. But I know, after all, very little about Miss Viner; and ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... bring into relief his personality. I expect that I've been too much concerned to draw a picture of him as a man, in doing which I've perhaps been unsuccessful in giving you a picture of him as a priest. It's always difficult to talk or write about one's intimate religious feelings, and you've been the only person to whom I ever have been able to talk about them. However much I admire and revere Father Rowley I doubt if I could talk or write to him about myself as I do ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... and another on He and She. That would be a dialogue between a boy and girl just as they were leaving school, and would tell their ideals of life. Then do you remember you said to me one day, 'Follow your Saint'? I'd love to write about that. I didn't have a single thought in Wareham, and now I have a new one every minute, so I must try and write the essay here; think it out, at any rate, while I am so happy and free and rested. Look at the pebbles in the bottom ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... held a Court. The Doctor and Terry chose to go with me. Captain and Mrs. Hamilton came to dinner. Desperate warm weather! Little done in the literary way except sending off proofs. Roup of standing corn, etc., went off very indifferently. Letter from Ballantyne wanting me to write about absentees. But I have enough to do without burning my ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... of this unlucky race, Mary Stuart was the favourite of misfortune. As Brantome has said of her, "Whoever desires to write about this illustrious queen of Scotland has, in her, two very, large subjects, the one her life, the other her death," Brantome had known her on one of the most mournful occasions of her life—at the moment when she ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... write about his ongoings, which were all disgraceful and shameful, in accordance with the nature of the actor. He repeated the 'Pater Noster' three times, answered questions from the Catechism and the Bible, said that the devils held service ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... all this does not alter the fact that I do not see the book I could write about her," muttered Durtal. "In spite of my wish to be agreeable to dear Madame Bavoil, no—I have no inclination to ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... relations between the Sees of Canterbury and York." If Froude had written an elaborate History of Henry II., as he wrote a History of Henry VIII., he would have qualified himself in the manner somewhat bombastically described. But even Lord Acton, who seemed to think that he could not write about anything until he knew everything, would scarcely have prepared himself for an article in The Nineteenth Century by mastering the history of the world. And if Froude had done so, it would have profited him little. He would have forgotten it, "with that calm oblivion of facts ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... The Times correspondent and said: "Well, that was a display. You have something to write about now!" But he replied that as we were on friendly terms with Austria he should certainly not report it. Nor did the papers to which I wrote think fit to publish this highly significant affair. Thus is the trend of Foreign Affairs hidden from ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... well to say write about anything, but it is easier said than done. You will find that I have written Charley a long letter, and I had no idea of doing so when I began, as you see I commenced on note paper. But what would be the use of my writing to you on such subjects, and all others are soon disposed ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... pitches it is carried, You can hardly find a Parson to get buried or get married; Or supposing any accident that suddenly alarms, If you're dying for a surgeon, you must fetch him from the "Arms"; While the Schoolmasters and Tooters are neglecting of their scholars, To write about a ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... all such reading as was never read: For thee explain a thing till all men doubt it, And write about it, ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... occupations will not permit you to give time to this matter, perhaps you will assist me by pointing to works calculated to throw light upon the subject of my inquiry, or by putting me in correspondence with persons who have the ability and the leisure to write about it. ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... pleasant, for Caesar loved power, and intended to be one of the big men of his time. But the lady also loved power, and was undoubtedly glad to see that she could make Caesar forget about going home, though it was too bad that he forgot, for always, even after he had lived to write about all the great things he had done in the world, people remembered more about his rather absurd infatuation for the lady than about all the battles he had won and all the prizes he had captured. ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... to write about?" I retorted. "And you can't have spent five years at a great public school like Kensingtowe without one or two sensational things. Pick them out and let us have them. For whatever the modern theorists say, the main duty of a story-teller is ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... good to listen to this sincere, naive man, still young ... who would re-make life nearer to the beauty and harmony that Shelley also dreamed for mankind. I lived in a state of perpetual reverence toward Baxter. This man tried to live his ideals, as well as write about them. ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... Meanwhile, clever as it is, the tale seems oddly anaemic and unreal. It is like those tragically trivial journals of 1914 that still survive in the dusty waiting-rooms of dentists. I don't suggest that Mr. BROWN, whose previous book I much admired, should write about the War; but I could wish him a little more in tune with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various
... not in Arcadia when you are in the west of England, and they may catch infection from the world without visiting the metropolis. But you seem to have set your heart upon this same cottage plan; and God prosper you in the experiment! I am at a loss for more to write about; so 'tis as well that I am arrived at the bottom of ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... very curious book recently published (Some Revelations as to "Raymond," by a Plain Citizen; London, Kegan Paul), to which some attention may now be devoted, the writer, himself a firm believer in spiritualism and one obviously in a position to write about it, points out that the old term "magic" has been relegated to the performances of conjurers, and the terminology so altered as to make spiritualism appear to be a new gospel, whereas the contrary is the case. "The impression prevailed ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... back as long as possible from grappling with its difficulties; twist about and about, talking of many irrelevant matters, before they can summon up resolution to go at the real point they have got to write about! How much unwillingness there is fairly to put ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... lover as a mark of great kindness. This rumour, however, I cannot verify from personal observation, much less have I to boast of any such favour. But we will talk of these things if we should meet; if not, we will write about them. ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... mind, you are ready to ask yourself: What have I to write about? Let us put the question more concretely: Have you lived, for instance, in a little mining town in the West? Such a little town, with its saloons and automatics and flannel-shirted hero, stares at us every month from the pages of popular ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... quail, ragamuffin, riff-raff, rigmarole, scant, seedy, out of sorts, stale, tardy, trash. How Halliwell ever came to class these words as archaic I cannot imagine; but I submit that any one who sets forth to write about the English of England ought to have sufficient acquaintance with the language to check and reject Halliwell's amazing classification. Does Mr. Tucker so despise British English as never to read an English book? How else is one to account for his imagining for a ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... ask me so many questions, and egg me on to write about these people instead of minding my business? If you really want to hear, I'll tell you of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... tutelary object of worship.' An object of worship, of course, is not necessarily a totem! Nor is a totem by the definition (as a rule one of a class of objects) anything but a natural object. Mr. Max Muller wishes that 'those who write about totems and totemism would tell us exactly what they mean by these words.' I have told him, and indicated better sources. I apply the word totemism to the widely diffused savage institution which I ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... foreigners who read these journals know that in what the members of one party say of those of the other, or are reported to say, there is often but little truth; and that there is still less of truth in what the editors and correspondents of the ultra journals of one party write about the characters, conduct, and sentiments of the members of ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... he was doing the literature for the Barnum show, Tody Hamilton would have made the best nominee I can think of. Remember, don't you, how when Tody started in to write about the elephant quadrille you had to turn over to the next page to find the verb? And almost any one of those young fellows who write advertising folders for the railroads would gladly tackle the assignment; ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... the correspondence was not so regular as before—and perhaps the expressions on both sides not quite so tender; for it is impossible for a man in the Clarendon, with a carriage at the door to carry him down to Ascot, to write about flames and arrows, which come so naturally when musing on the Cam or Isis. And in the midst of this London career—during all which, he assured me, he liked her better than ever—he was startled by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... I MUST have!" she said—"otherwise I could not live. It is a necessary muscle. But what YOU call 'heart'—and what the dear elusive poets write about, is simply brain,—that is to say, an impulsive movement of the brain, suggesting the desirability of a particular person's companionship—and we elect to call that 'love'! On ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... a pretty tame cruise to write about, for nothing really occurred. We were only on the watch for some untoward happening; that made it nerve wracking. But even when we sighted the spur of land which we knew marked the southern boundary of the de la Plata—the ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... to its aim. I should like to discuss it with my father, but am afraid to touch a sore point. Instead of this, I will discuss it with my diary. Perhaps it will be just the thing to give it any value. Besides, what can be more natural than to write about what interests me? Everybody carries within him his tragedy. Mine is this same 'improductivite slave' of the Ploszowskis. Not long ago, when romanticism flourished in hearts and poetry, everybody carried his tragedy draped ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... have to say it, Professor, I know what you're thinking. I'm a reporter, and my business is to tell the world everything I know. But if I did it, there might not be a world for me to write about, would there? No, thanks, Professor. As far as I'm concerned, what I told you was nothing more than ...
— The Delegate from Venus • Henry Slesar
... come to thee?" I ask him, and all the while I am making the sign of the cross over him. "Was it not when thou didst write about thy doubts?" ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... "People talk and write about instantaneous momentary conversions—I never realized what was meant till a week ago. Day after day, all that time, I had been filled with gloomy, reproachful, or bitter thoughts of God and the providence which ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... at the time we write about, regular witch-finders, as in the time of James the First, still the feeling against witches, and the belief that they practised, existed. They were no longer handed over to summary and capital punishment, but, whenever suspected, they were sure to meet with very rough treatment. Such was ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... about cows in a pasture," commented Abner, "is just to write about them—in a simple, straightforward style without any slant toward history or mythology, and without any cross-references to remote scenes of foreign travel. For instance, ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... you what you write about in your office," said he, "and if need arose, I should come to you to ask about it. But you're so positive you know all the lore of the forest. It's difficult. ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... of the poet’s riddle as he gave it to me. He thought that ‘Merlin and the Gleam’ would probably be enough of biography for those friends who urged him to write about himself. However, this has not been their verdict, and I have tried to do what he said that ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... frightful contingency might happen any day; and what should she, Clara, do in that case? She told me no news; she lamented over the possibility of Karl's being summoned upon active service. It was, she said, grausam, schrecklich! It made her almost faint to write about it, and yet she did compose four whole pages in that condition. The barrack, she informed me, was turned into a hospital, and she and "Tante" both worked hard. There was much work—dreadful work to do—such poor groaning fellows to nurse! "Herrgott!" cried poor little ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... what we can do for him. The police might think it right to keep us all there too—and I'm that eager to get you home to ease your dear Grandmamma and the General. I think it's best to go on and get your Grandpapa to write about ...
— "Us" - An Old Fashioned Story • Mary Louisa S. Molesworth
... nothing to write about. The winter and its discomforts do not inspire me any more than the news from the front does, and no need to tell you that does not ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... ribbons. Presently they were sitting close together, talking with April faces, and telling their stories as women must when they meet after the lapse of years. A few letters had passed between them, but Bella had been abroad, and Christie too busy living her life to have much time to write about it. ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... I am growing to be a dreadful egotist. I put nothing down now in this little book but just what concerns myself—nothing of the great subjects of universal interest which have always absorbed most of my thoughts, but just my own doings and sayings. At this very moment I desire only to write about my afternoon, and the way in which I spent it. I will indulge myself, and the record may serve me. How it had snowed all day! how it did snow this afternoon when I started out, wrapped in my waterproof, accoutred to encounter ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... to answer in detail all the questions that proposed themselves, or to follow any one of them along its slenderest ramifications. The science of aesthetics is a complex business and so is the history of art; my hope has been to write about them something simple and true. For instance, though I have indicated very clearly, and even repetitiously, what I take to be essential in a work of art, I have not discussed as fully as I might have done the relation of the essential to the unessential. ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... to do was to twist my head in order to make sure of it. I also reflected, I believe, that I was in the position of a man who has bet all he owns, with large odds on losing either way. But on the whole I was occupied with more trivial matters a letter I had forgotten to write about a month's rent, a client whose summer address I had mislaid. The sun was burning my neck behind when a whistle aroused me to the realization that the tug was no longer a toy boat dancing in the distance, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... article brawly,' she would say timidly, 'but I'm doubting it's the last - I always have a sort of terror the new one may be the last,' and if many days elapsed before the arrival of another article her face would say mournfully, 'The blow has fallen - he can think of nothing more to write about.' If I ever shared her fears I never told her so, and the articles that were not Scotch grew in number until there were hundreds of them, all carefully preserved by her: they were the only thing in the house that, having served one purpose, she did not convert into something else, yet they ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
... something over one hundred years ago. Bancroft, I say, commenced earlier, and I am not prepared to dispute his word if he should say that he had kept an accurate journal from the time he commenced to write about the country to the present, because there has been no period of time when I have been alive that I have not heard of Bancroft, and I should be equally credulous if President Lane should tell me that he was here at the founding of ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... many critical remarks on the general character of the compositions discussed in it. But I have never carried out the plan (which I think indispensable) of reading over again whatever work, however well known, one has to write about, with more satisfaction. The main defects lie on the surface. Despite great felicities of a certain kind, these poems have no claim to formal perfection, and occasionally sin by very great carelessness, if not by something worse. The poet frankly ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... suddenly pose as heroes of the Guy Livingstone type, fellows who "screw up" timid dons, box with colossal watermen, and read all night with wet towels bound round their fevered brows. These sketches are all nonsense. Men who do these things do not write about them; and men who write about ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... going to write about the Americans[861]. If you have picked up any hints among your lawyers, who are great masters of the law of nations, or if your own mind suggests any thing, let me know. But mum, it ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... vexes me to write about that person in any connection with yourself. Emma spoke of her in her last letter from Sark; not at all in reference to you, however. She is so completely of a lower class, that it would never enter Emma's ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... "You see, Uncle, I wouldn't have come up here to observe if I thought they were not from the best families. Anybody I'd care to write about—you understand, Uncle." ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey
... ""You said we might write about a visit. I never visited but once. It was at my Aunt Mary's last winter. My Aunt Mary is a very particular woman and a great housekeeper. The first night I was there we were at tea. I knocked over a jug and broke it. Aunt Mary said she had ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... in relation to the limited and imperfect knowledge of man. But the misery is, that men write about freewill without a single meditation on will absolutely; on the idea [Greek: katt' exochaen] without any idea; and so bewilder themselves in the jungle of alien conceptions; and to understand the truth they ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... not! Why not!! Suppose you had to write about a play by Pinero and one by Jones! Would you say exactly ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... personal, to ask for leave to return; but this was just what Dalou's pride would never let him do, and although he was willing to ask me verbally, and even to refer to the matter in a private letter to myself, he never would write about it to anyone in France. Dalou was afterwards selected to make the official statues of the Republic, and may be said to have become, after the general amnesty, Sculptor-in-Ordinary to the Government ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... to bed half an hour ago, I was deadly sleepy. Now, after looking out of the window a little while, my brain is strong and clear, and I feel as if I could write till morning. But, unfortunately, I have nothing to write about. And then, if I expect to rise early, I must turn in betimes. The whole village is asleep, godless metropolitan that I am! The lamps on the square without flicker in the wind; there is nothing abroad but the blue darkness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... prompt them. Saint Teresa, paradoxical as such a judgment may sound, was a typical shrew, in this sense of the term. The bustle of her style, as well as of her life, proves it. Not only must she receive unheard-of personal favors and spiritual graces from her Saviour, but she must immediately write about them and exploiter them professionally, and use her expertness to give instruction to those less privileged. Her voluble egotism; her sense, not of radical bad being, as the really contrite have it, but of her "faults" and "imperfections" in the plural; her stereotyped ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... great silver inkstand on the table, paper and pens, and we wrote, "Respect Property!" "Liberty for Italy and Hungary!" and hung the papers up around the room. I wrote one or two myself, and touched the inkstand for luck, in case I should ever write about ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... indeed been a friend to Jack Simpson, but there was another friend to whom, according to his promise, Jack reported his doings, not telling everything, perhaps, for Jack was not very apt to talk or write about himself; but once a year he sent a letter in reply to a long and wise one which he received from his friend the artist, according to their agreement, for Jack had ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... complain that I never write about George. You don't deserve to hear, since you refuse to come to our wedding. But would you talk, if you happened to be in love? There, I have told you more than ever I told George, whose conceit has to be kept ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... off writing, I write such stuff; and if I go on writing to you, I shall be putting these things '—!—!—!' The way you write about Mrs. Lovell, convinces me you are not in my scrape, or else gentlemen are just as different from their inferiors as ladies are from theirs. That's the question. What is the meaning of your 'not being able to leave her for a day, for fear she should fall under other influences'? ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "She begun to write about the time I did," he said, tasting the flavor of reminiscence. "I used to see her name in the papers when I never so much as thought I should write a line myself. She's been a great influence ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... as to how I am to write about him. I must encourage myself with the consideration that none but our own friends, with whom, whether they understood us or not, we are safe, will know to whom the ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... be punctilious with me. For we have nothing to write about, except it be how much we all love and honour you; and that you believe already, or else you don't do ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... The third historian to write about the prisoner of the Iles Sainte-Marguerite was Lagrange-Chancel. He was just twenty-nine years of age when, excited by Freron's hatred of Voltaire, he addressed a letter from his country place, Antoniat, in Perigord, to the 'Annee Litteraire' (vol. ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the taint of "copy" everywhere. That is really the fundamental distinction. It is the misfortune of literary people, that they have to write about something. There is no reason, of course, why they should, but the thing is so. Consequently, they are always looking about them for something to write about. They cannot take a pure-minded interest in anything in earth or heaven. Their servant is no servant, but a character; ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... singing-teachers, whose business it is to educate the voice for "the opera of the future," I am really unable to write about them. In the first place, I know nothing about "the future," the unborn; and, in the second place, I have more than enough ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... the unfortunate Brooks, after the fashion of all jealous lovers, deserted his allies for his fair enemy. "I don't cotton to what THEY say, Sally, but you DO write to him, and I don't see what you've got to write about—you and him. Jule Jeffcourt says that when you got religion at Louisville during the revival, you felt you had a call to write and save sinners, and you did that as your trial and probation, but that since you backslided and are ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... acknowledge that their journal was likely to die of 'superiority to its public,' long before the three years were over; but, barring this disaster, they gave me assurance of regular employment. This was the very thing for me. One could write about books anywhere. I thankfully closed with the offer and began to study the ha'-penny evening papers with assiduity, in order to learn the craft of manufacturing ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... anybody should be allowed to write in the book if they found out anything good that anyone else had done, but not things that were public acts; and nobody was to write about themselves, or anything other people told them, ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... others. But more striking, perhaps, than any illustration mentioned there is that furnished by the fact before us now. What must His thoughts about Himself have been who could speak of Himself in relation to all others as Christ does here? When men write about Jesus as though He were merely a gentle, trustful, religious genius, preaching a sweet gospel of the love of God to the multitudes of Galilee, they are but shutting their eyes to one half of the facts which it is their ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... what I am going to write about? Do I feel it strongly? Do I know it thoroughly? Do I imagine it clearly? The young contributor had better ask himself all these questions, and as many more like them as he can think of. Perhaps he will end by ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... nobler things, these authors, whose homely language frequently touches our feelings deeply, make the reader notice that they have nothing in common with the sloppy cooks who boil their pots in chemical kitchens, and that the gold they write about is not the gold of the multitude; not the venal gold that they can exchange for money. Their language seems to sound as if they said, "Our gold is not of this world." Indeed they use expressions that can with absolute clearness be shown to have this sense. Authors of this type did ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... water, the dark blue sky that was bursting into stars, the mysterious outline of the hills, the ravishing perfumes rising from the garden below. "It is like a poem," she thought. "Why does no one write about it? Oh!" with a hard gasp, "if I could—if I could only write!" A meteor shot down the heavens. For the moment it seemed that the fallen star flashed through her brow and lodged, effulgent, in her brain. "I—I—think I could," she thought. "I—I—am sure that I could." And so, ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... truth, Launcelot," he began slowly, "I have something strange to tell the Judge, and I didn't want him to get away before I saw him. It isn't a thing to write about—and oh, why did I ...
— Judy • Temple Bailey
... it would be better to fix upon a subject first; but then she has never yet written a paper herself, so she does not realize that you have to have some thoughts before you can write them. She should think, she says, that I would write about something that I see. But of what use is it for me to write about what everybody is seeing, as long as they can see it ...
— The Last of the Peterkins - With Others of Their Kin • Lucretia P. Hale
... out in the make-up. There was too much to write about, and I was always over-set! I saw and felt, with you, and regarded it as more poignantly pathetic, the tragedy of that little handful of San Luisanos, herded away in the heart of those barren hills to make way for the white man. And now ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... "advanced" publisher, who loved to hear his wares called dangerous, and who walked on air when the reviewers said that such men as he were a curse to Society—as they occasionally did when there was nothing special to write about. ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... chilled, and without a single acquaintance in the great city, my situation was about as hopeless as it is possible to conceive. Successful authors in their libraries, sitting in cushioned chairs and dipping their pens into silver inkstands, may write about money with a beautiful scorn, and chant the praise of Poverty—the 'good goddess of Poverty,' as George Sand, making 50,000 francs a year, enthusiastically terms her;—but there is no condition in which the Real is so utterly at variance with the Ideal, as to be actually out of money, and hungry, ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... they never marry. As for myself, I know very well that if I am an old maid I shall try not to hurt others' feelings—I, inconsiderate! When she can think of nothing more to say, she scolds me about my cousin. It is hardly worth while, for what we write about! Alphonse wrote of nothing, in his last letter, but of the partridge he had shot and his hunting costume; he is such a boy! But why do you not say something? You sit there speechless; are you ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... say, your destiny to write about Cromwell: and you will make a book of him, at which the ears of our grandchildren will tingle;—and as one may hope that the ears of human nature will be growing longer and longer, the tingling will be proportionately greater than we are accustomed to. ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... Oh, you have said that so often! Nobody believes it. No; when a man can push political hatred so far as to write about an old friend, in whose house he has been a daily guest, as if he were a criminal—and all because he doesn't like his son-in-law, or his servant—one doesn't shake hands with him the very day his attacks appear in ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... little girl has developed into a verse writer of a very curious ability. She began theologically and wrote hymns, which I soon checked on observing that she put together words and sentences out of the sacred verse she knew, and set her to write about things she saw and observed. What she now produces is very like the verse of William Blake, and containing many images that she could never have read of. She cannot write, but she dictates them to her elder ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... insight; and we make no apology for translating most of them. Lastly, a generation that is always complaining of the modern over-production of books feels that it would be at home in a state of society in which our author found that, not to be too singular, he must at least write about writing history, if he declined writing it himself, even as Diogenes took to rolling his tub, lest he should be the only idle man when Corinth was bustling ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... nervous system of all knowledge. So far as man is concerned all truth is a sub-topic under his own soul, and the universe is the tool of his own life. Reading for different topics in it gives him a superficial knowledge of the men who write about them. Reading to know the men gives him a superficial knowledge, in the technical sense, of the things they write about. Let him stand up and take his choice like a man between being superficial in the ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... has written a book, or is about to do so, I feel that my apologies are rather due to the public for not having rushed into print before. I have really spared it because I had nothing in particular to write about, and I confess I am somewhat doubtful as to whether I am even now justified in invoking the kind offices of a publisher with a view to bringing forth this literary mouse ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... of comfort to me to write about everything, for one way and another I've had a good deal to put up with, all because of—girls. And I have to be good-tempered and nice just because they are girls. And besides that, I'm really very fond of them; and they're not bad. But no one who hasn't tried it knows in the least what ...
— The Girls and I - A Veracious History • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... himself, had he seen anything so gregariously ugly—operatively, ominously so cruel. He was glad to have found this last name for the whole character; "cruel" somehow played into the subject for an article—that his impression put straight into his mind. He would write about the heavy horrors that could still flourish, that lifted their undiminished heads, in an age so proud of its short way with false gods; and it would be funny if what he should have got from Mrs. Lowder were to prove, after all, but a small amount of copy. Yet the great thing, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... sketch of events and the reflexions arising from it. And in writing to you, as a lover of your country, my first subject will naturally be the state of the Republic; next, as I am the nearest object of your affection, I will also write about myself, and tell you what I think you will not be indisposed to know. Well then, in public affairs for the moment the chief subject of interest is the disturbance in Gaul. For the AEdui—"our brethren"[123]—have recently fought a losing battle, and the Helvetii are undoubtedly in arms ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... mistress don't write about such things. How could she, poor dear innocent lamb? It is easy to see you don't ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... and Christ, as if Christ and a book about him were the same thing. But this is a commonplace absurdity of what one may call the dedicatory genre, in which writers almost always speak of their book as if there were no difference between the book itself and its subject: thus, if they write about Caesar or Cato, "Caesar and Cato," they say, "prostrate themselves before you;" If about Cicero, "Look," they say, "Cicero addresses you and takes you as patron:" all of which are correctly to be reckoned in the category of ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... of life is a very fine thing to write about, and there are, indeed, some who resign themselves to it and accept it as it is, and even some who would persuade us that there is no problem in the "trap." But it has been said by Calderon that "to seek to persuade a man that the misfortunes which he suffers are not misfortunes, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... many a weary hour of the twenty-four. He used a thick yellowish paper cut quite square, and wrote a very small, neat, upright hand, as clear and legible as print. Every time I found him at his desk and saw those closely covered pages multiplying under his hand, I used to wonder what he could have to write about, and for whose eyes ...
— Monsieur Maurice • Amelia B. Edwards
... we shall be accused of glorifying War and telling lies about it. Well—there's a Frenchman who has told the truth, piling up all the horrors, faithfully, remorselessly, magnificently. But he seems to think people oughtn't to write about this War at all unless they show up the infamy of it, as a deterrent, so that no Government can ever start another one. It's a sort of literary "frightfulness." But who is he trying to frighten? Does he imagine that France, or England, or Russia or Belgium, or Serbia, will want to ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... doubt she is very unhappy. But as you say we must not be uncharitable. I suppose you will have to write about ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford |
