“If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?”

“The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds”

“Vimes had got around to a Clean Desk policy. It was a Clean Floor strategy
that eluded him at the moment.”

“(Sign) Mid-year resolutions of the barely under-control. (Woman at desk) I will try to be more understanding of others. I will try to be more patient when dealing with the incompetent people that surround me. I will not slap anyone first thing in the morning. (Sign on desk) The buck stops before it gets here.”

“Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

“When I was hired they showed me my desk, an old beat-up scarred wooden desk, and they told me that it had been O. Henry’s desk when O. Henry worked for the paper, as he had at one time. And I readily believed it. I could see the place where O. Henry had savagely stabbed the desk with his pen in pursuit of a slimy adjective just out of reach, and a kind of bashed-in-looking place where O. Henry had beaten his poor genius head on the desk in frustration over not being able to capture the noun leaping like a fawn just out of reach… So I sat down at the desk and I too began to chase those devils, the dancy nouns and come-hither adjectives, what joy.”

“A king fortifies himself with a castle, a gentleman with a desk.”

“A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.”

“I come closer to my desk as to a bulwark against life.”

“Some parents just work at…I don't know…Microscoft (She mispronounced the word. She meant Microsoft) and just sit there at a desk and their kids have to sit at a desk, too and…I don't know!”