"Brownstone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... first nights and operas sung by Melba, Sembrich, and the Brothers de Reszke, was showing his city-bred children his native hills and introducing them to the beauties of a world alien to asphalt pavements and brownstone fronts. ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... with, I decided to forego Publilius Syrus for the day, since I was no longer in the mood and I had some important papers to edit. So I returned to my home, a rather large and comfortable room on the first floor of a converted brownstone in lower Manhattan. I had no sooner settled down at my desk when there came an urgent knock on my door. I slipped on my glasses and opened the door. Imagine my amazement and irritation when the little man from the library scuttled into the room. He hurried to the window and pulled ...
— "To Invade New York...." • Irwin Lewis
... her tone to be smug; but if she had glanced sidewise at her husband, she might have seen the pained red mount from chin to brow. She did not seem to sense his hurt. They went on, past the plaza now. Only a few blocks lay between them and their home; the old brownstone house that had been New York's definition of architectural elegance in the time ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... situated on Forty ——th Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, a neighborhood at one time much in vogue, but now given up almost entirely to boarding-houses of the cheaper kind. Old-fashioned brownstone residences, with high ceilings, cracked walls, dirty, paper-patched windows, and narrow little gardens choked up with weeds, they were as unattractive-looking from without as they were gloomy and destitute of comfort ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... I never heard that he made any gifts. He took everything offered him from a brownstone front downwards, until it got to a bull-pup with the ...
— The Honest American Voter's Little Catechism for 1880 • Blythe Harding
... surroundings ever made any difference whether the guests were "carriage company" or not, to quote good Mrs. McGuffey. Peter would not be Peter if he lived anywhere else, and Miss Felicia wouldn't be half so quaint and charming if she had received her guests behind a marble or brownstone front with an awning stretched to the curbstone and a red velvet carpet laid across the sidewalk, the whole patrolled by a bluecoat and two ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Avenue past the Hotel Essex. There was not a soul to be seen. Even the silver-laced porter had retired from the freezing vestibule. A few moments later Miss Erith paused before a shop on the ground floor of an old-fashioned brownstone residence which had been altered ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... Orde scribbled a line in his note-book, tore it out, folded it, and left it. In it he stated his regret, his short residence in the city, and desired an early opportunity to call. Then he departed down the brownstone steps, totally unconscious of the contempt he had inspired in the heart of the liveried ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... doubted this than she doubted God Himself. It was His law. He had ordained it so. She had grown so used to the throngs below her window and so loved the little park with its splashing fountain that she had refused to follow her landlady uptown when the brownstone boarding-house facing the Square had been ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... he and Bubbles had taken off into a suit-case marked "A.P." (Amelia Popple), and led the way downstairs. A little later a taxicab drew up at the curb, and the two disguised secret-service agents sauntered down the high steps of Mrs. Popple's brownstone house, looking neither to the right nor to the left, and ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... simply one of the contradictions of metropolitan life. In twenty years' acquaintance with the police office, I have seen money, diamonds, coffins, horses, and tubs of butter brought there and pass into the keeping of the property clerk as lost or strayed. I remember a whole front stoop, brownstone, with steps and iron railing all complete, being put up at auction, unclaimed. But these were mere representatives of a class which as a whole kept its place and the peace. The children did neither. One might have been tempted to apply the old inquiry about the pins to them but for ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... could raise money on a mortgage. He planned at the same time to remove his office farther south on Third Street and occupy a building of his own. He knew where an option was to be had on a twenty-five-foot building, which, though old, could be given a new brownstone front and made very significant. He saw in his mind's eye a handsome building, fitted with an immense plate-glass window; inside his hardwood fixtures visible; and over the door, or to one side of it, set in bronze letters, Cowperwood & Co. ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... soldiers had made a corner in eggs and had bought nearly all of them, which, of course, made them scarce at the hotels and eating places. All the water used in the hotel is filtered through a huge block of brownstone and even then it is ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... familiar tune. The city was New Brunswick. I turned down a side street where two stone churches stood side by side. A gate in the picket fence had been left open, and I went in looking for a place to sleep. Back in the churchyard I found what I sought in the brownstone slab covering the tomb of, I know now, an old pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church, who died full of wisdom and grace. I am afraid that I was not over-burdened with either, or I might have gone to bed with a full stomach, too, instead of chewing the last of the windfall ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... comfort. The long succession of cross streets was yet mostly secure from business, after you passed Clinton Place; commerce was just beginning to show itself in Union Square, and Madison Square was still the home of the McFlimsies, whose kin and kind dwelt unmolested in the brownstone stretches of Fifth Avenue. I tried hard to imagine them from the acquaintance Mr. Butler's poem had given me, and from the knowledge the gentle satire of The 'Potiphar Papers' had spread broadcast ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a little awed. He had seen the great brownstone temple upon the hill—a structure far more splendid than anything he had ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... they drove for ages between depressing examples in brownstone of an architecture which, like George, was trying rather vaguely to express nothing; and then rolling heavily into Fifty-seventh Street stopped presently before one of the solemn houses which stood, in the dignity ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... in a brownstone house, in a dirty neighborhood just west of Seventh Avenue, and of where now stands the York Hotel. Three weeks ago I revisited it and found it unchanged. At the time of my first visit, on the jamb of the front ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... there," retorted Diogenes. "What you don't know would fill a circulating library. Well—I lived in a tub. Now, if I believed in envy, I suppose you think I'd be envious of people who live in brownstone fronts with back yards and ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... street, close to the house which should have been Dorothy's, he discovered that the numbering on the doors had been wretchedly mismanaged. One or the other of two brownstone fronts must be her residence; he could not determine which. The nearest was lighted from top to bottom. In the other a single pair of windows only, on the second floor, showed the slightest sign ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... long run it comes to much the same thing. The epic novelists prefer the panorama: she the drawing-room canvas. They deduce from vast philosophies and depict society. She gives us the Mingotts, the Mansons, the Van der Luydens—society, in its little brownstone New York of the '70's—and lets us formulate inductively the code of America. A little canvas is enough for a great picture if the ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... to a quieter up-town night that was already pointed with a first star, he took her arm as they turned off into a side-street that was architecturally a barracks to the eye, brownstone front after brownstone front after brownstone front. Block after block of New York's side-streets are sunk thus in ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... my wants are few; I only wish a hut of stone, (A very plain brownstone will do,) That I may call my own;— And close at hand is such a one, In yonder street that ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... the streets have crowded so disrespectfully about it the whole place still has a sort of "world-with-out-end-amen" air—perhaps because of the impressive squareness of its structure, great blocks of brownstone joined solidly; perhaps because of the enormous gnarled wistaria vines that stretch above its massive cornices—but one does feel as Felicia Day herself did when some one asked her how long she thought it had been there. She said she ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... one day from his newspaper, when the Speaker took the vote on an "Act to amend the Incorporation of the City of Philadelphia," which your correspondent happened to know included the presentation of a three-story brownstone front to each of a committee of six members of the House, he found there was not one member in his seat; but, in the place of a few, there was a company of these remarkable Aye-ayes, responding duly to the call for a vote; but never a no among ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 5, April 30, 1870 • Various
... sold the old house of Christopher's father, an immense brownstone mansion a few squares away, and lived in a modern, flat-faced gray-stone house that rose five stories from the beautifully arranged basement entrance. There were stone benches at the entrance, and ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... won't remember me no more. Maybe the servant won't let me in," thought Mrs. Pelz as she walked by the brownstone house on Eighty-fourth Street where she had been told Hanneh Breineh now lived. At last she summoned up enough courage to climb the steps. She was all out of breath as she rang the bell with trembling fingers. "Oi weh! even the outside smells ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Renmark, that's so!" cried Yates enthusiastically. "A brownstone mansion on Fifth Avenue, and a log hut on the shores of Lake Superior! That would suit me down to the ground. Spend half the ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... had risen with his bettered circumstances from a two-story brick in Degraw street, Brooklyn, by the usual stages to a brownstone "mansion" above the reservoir in New York. When he came to be vice-president of the Bank of Manhadoes, Hilbrough had in a measure reached the goal of his ambition. He felt that he could slacken the strenuousness ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... the watch for some retired spot where he might safely examine his prize and see how much money he had secured. For a long time he saw no place that seemed to him a safe one for his purpose, so he went on and on until suddenly he realised that he was tired. He was passing a large brownstone church at the moment, and he sat down on ...
— The Bishop's Shadow • I. T. Thurston
... with searching glances, and was somewhat reassured. Apparently he called at an hour when the Boche pickets were off duty; at the moment there was no pedestrian visible within a block's distance on either hand, nobody that he could see skulked in the areas of the old-fashioned brownstone houses ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... is money in farming," says he, "lots of it, but the Negro farmer has been systematically robbed by the white man since the close of the Civil War. If the Negro farmers were to be returned all the interest in excess of 8 per cent charged them for money advanced them they would to-day be living in brownstone mansions, just as the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... his the ugly features of two men, who peered into the limousine from under the visors of their black caps. The car sped up town through the bewildering maze of street traffic. The chauffeur helped him up the steps of the brownstone mansion, while Grimsby's old butler swung open the glass door, with a helping hand ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... which stood on the crest of Whittaker's Hill, and built in its place a big imposing residence. It was by far the finest house in Bayport, and Heman made it finer as the years passed. There were imitation brownstone pillars supporting its front porch, iron dogs and scroll work iron benches bordering its front walk, and a pair of stone urns, in summer filled with flowers, beside its big iron ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... side street that ran between Central Park and the Hudson River. It was a tall house, standing two stories higher than any other structure in the block. Like most of its neighbors it had evidently seen better days. In places the brownstone front was cracked and great chips had flaked off. The broken stones in the long flight of steps that led up to the first floor were patched with colored cement that had faded so the patches stood out baldly. The brass handrail above ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss |
