A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

-Anonymous
  Sign on desk of  American Express president Louis Gerstner. Quoted in the NewYork Times, 26  Jun.

She that with poetry is won Is but a desk to write upon.

-Butler, Samuel
  Hudibras, pt.2, canto1, l.591^2.

Avotary of the desköa notched and cropt scriveneröone that sucks his substance, as certain sick people are said to do, through a quill.

-Lamb, Charles
  Essays of Elia,'Oxford in the Vacation'.

I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses.

-Yeats,W(illiam) B(utler)
  'Easter,1916', l.1^4. Collected in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921).