Quotes about housing
page 5

“A house with old furniture has no need of ghosts to be haunted.”

Hope Mirrlees book Lud-in-the-Mist

Source: Lud-in-the-Mist

“The ego is not master in its own house.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis (1917)
1910s

“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

Books, Imagination

“People have often told me that one of their strongest childhood memories is the scent of their grandmother's house. I never knew my grandmothers, but I could always count of the Bookmobile.”

Adriana Trigiani (1970) American film director

Source: Big Stone Gap

People, Memory, Childhood

“… what makes you older is when your bones, muscles and blood wear out, when the heart sinks into oblivion and all the houses you ever lived in are gone and people are not really certain that your civilization ever existed.”

Richard Brautigan The Tokyo-Montana Express

Source: The Tokyo-Montana Express

People, Heart

“Living with kids is like living in a frat house… everything's broken, nobody sleeps, and there's alot of throwing up”

Ray Romano (1957) American stand-up comedian

on Everybody Loves Raymond

Sleep

“Grief is like a drunken house guest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.”

Stephen King book Bag of Bones

Source: Bag of Bones

“I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.”

Jon Stewart (1962) American political satirist, writer, television host, actor, media critic and stand-up comedian

Way, Fashion

“The whole house seemed to exhale a melancholy breath of emptiness”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

“O grant me a house by the beach of a bay,
Where the waves can be surly in winter, and play
With the sea-weed in summer, ye bountiful powers!
And I'd leave all the hurry, the noise, and the fray,
For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.”

Andrew Lang (1844–1912) Scots poet, novelist and literary critic

Books, Flowers, Winter, Summer

“He built a small house, called a cocoon, around himself. He stayed inside for more than two weeks. Then he nibbled a hole in the cocoon, pushed his way out and…

he was a beautiful butterfly!”

Eric Carle book The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Source: The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Beauty, Way

“It's a party house."
"I hope for your sake it's a very tame party." If he brought me to some sort of sex orgy, he would fly right through one of those pretty windows, headfirst.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Bleeds

Hope, Sex, Flying

“While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Source: Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

Men

“Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid.”

Dean Koontz (1945) American author

Books, Way

“I put tape on the mirrors in my house so I don't accidentally walk through into another dimension.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

“How is Eric?'
'Very tightly wound. Plus, a lot of stuff happened that he'll tell you about.'
'Thanks for the warning. I'll go to the house now. You're my favorite breather.'
'Oh. Well… great.'
She hung up.”

Charlaine Harris Dead in the Family

Source: Dead in the Family

“And I realized as I walked through the neighborhood how each house could contain a completely different reality. In a single block, there could be fifty seperate worlds. Nobody ever really knew what was going on just next door.”

Janet Fitch book White Oleander

Source: White Oleander

World, Reality

“The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king.”

Stephen King book 'Salem's Lot

Source: 'Salem's Lot

Secret

“I've been thinking of installing a train in my house. It could bring me shrimp crackers from the kitchen.”

Cassandra Clare book Lady Midnight

Source: Lady Midnight

Thinking, Training

“Best friends are always together, always whispering and laughing and running, always at each other's house, having dinner, sleeping over. They are practically adopted by each other's parents. You can't pry them apart.”

Jerry Spinelli book Loser

Source: Loser

Parent, Sleep

“Republicans don't like people to talk about depressions. You can hardly blame them for that. You remember the old saying: Don't talk about rope in the house where somebody has been hanged.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

People

“I’m not afraid of the darkness outside.
It’s the darkness inside houses I don’t like.”

Shelagh Delaney (1938–2011) English playwright

“The rain comes down harder, darkness falls. We don't care. Together in our house, in the firelight, we are the world made small.”

Jennifer Donnelly book Revolution

Source: Revolution

World

“A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

“A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not an article for mere consumption, but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Life, Men, Books

“Every plan is a house of cards.”

Holly Black book The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Source: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

“The sons of York will destroy each other, one brother destroying another, uncles devouring nephews, fathers beheading sons. They are a house which has to have blood, and they will shed their own if they have no other enemy.”

Philippa Gregory book The White Queen

Source: The White Queen

“We had our breakfasts--whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn't matter, you must have your breakfast.”

Wilkie Collins book The Moonstone

Also in Recipes from an Edwardian Country House: A Stately English Home Shares Its Classic Tastes by Laura Schaefer [Simon & Schuster, 2013, ISBN 1-476-73033-4] ( p. 22 https://books.google.com/books?id=zZPzAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA22) <br class="br">Source: The Moonstone [Street, 1868] ( p. 49 https://books.google.com/books?id=FmsOAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA49).

“If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

To his personal secretary John Colville the evening before Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. As quoted by Andrew Nagorski in The Greatest Battle (2007), Simon & Schuster, pp. 150–151 ISBN 0743281101
The Second World War (1939–1945)
Variant: If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.

Hell

“I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

Family, Problem, Thinking

“The House is in the house”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Chapter 38
Source: The Red Pyramid

“Houses are cellular walls; they keep our problems from bleeding into everyone else's.”

Jodi Picoult book Handle With Care

Source: Handle with Care

Problem

“I lived for the night, because I could go over to your house. It was the only thing that kept me going. You were the only thing, actually. It was… you.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover at Last

Night

“I don't care if we have our house, or a cliff ledge, or a cardboard box. Home is wherever we all are, together”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Home, Box

“My lovely shining fragile broken house is filled with flowers and founded on a rock.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Love, Flowers

“Witch, do this for me,
Find me a moon
made of longing.
Then cut it sliver thin,
and having cut it,
hang it high
above my beloved's house,
so that she may look up
tonight
and see it,
and seeing it, sigh for me
as I sigh for her,
moon or no moon.”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

“Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself. That you and the mice in the walls were the only ones still breathing.”

Stephen King book Lisey's Story

Source: Lisey's Story

Lying

“If you do not intend to help us," she said, "then leave this house. Dawn is coming."
"I am not a vampire." Magnus said. "I shall not disappear with the light"
"You will if I kill you before the sun comes up.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Midnight Heir

Light, Sun, Help

“They say that 'home is where the heart is.' I think it is where the house is, and the adjacent buildings.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Home, Thinking, Heart

“Regular women carry pictures of their babies, their husbands, their summer houses. Fat ladies carry pictures of themselves at their skinniest.”

Jennifer Weiner book Good in Bed

Source: Good in Bed

Women, Summer, Baby

“I dwell in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Summer

“Jump to the day we'll all be dead and none of this will matter. Jump to the day another house will stand here and the people living there won't know we ever happened.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Invisible Monsters

Source: Invisible Monsters

People, Dead

“All I really want is enough to live on, a little house in the country… and a tree in the garden with seven of my enemies hanging in it.”

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic

Tree, Country

“I just listened to the music, and breathed in the day, and remembered things. Things like walking around the neighborhood and looking at the houses and the lawns and the colorful trees and having that be enough.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Music, Color, Tree

“The little pig began to pray
But Wolfie blew his house away.
He shouted, "Bacon, Pork, and Ham!
Oh what a lucky wolf I am!"
And though he ate the pig quite fast,
He carefully kept the tail till last.”

Roald Dahl book Revolting Rhymes

Source: Revolting Rhymes

Wolf

“You know what I like about you? You have no sense. You sit here in my house, you can barely hold a spoon, and you're telling me 'no'. You'd pull on Death's whiskers if you could reach them.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Burns

Death, Sense

“Love mattered, in the end. A house without love would always fall, maybe not today or tomorrow, but in the end without love nothing could endure.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Bullet

Source: Bullet

Love

“Some women marry houses.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

Women

“So many things I had thought forgotten
Return to my mind with stranger pain:
Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.”

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) English poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian

Pain

“When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

Source: I Feel Bad about My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

Happiness, Children, Dogs, Funny

“hey. I just wanted to make sure you got home," I say. "Katniss, I live three houses away from you," he says.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Home

“The act of reading is a partnership. The author builds a house, but the reader makes it a home.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Source: Between the Lines

Home, Reading, Partnership

“I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don’t. It’s the great mystery. (Steve Jobs)”

Walter Isaacson book Steve Jobs

Source: Steve Jobs

Religion, Thinking

“Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.”

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

World, Travel, Light

“My relationship with my father had been on the proverbial fritz since the time I was fifteen and called the police to report him for child molesting. He had never molested me, but I wanted to have a party that weekend and needed him out of the house.”

Chelsea Handler (1975) American comedian, actress, author and talk show host

Source: My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands (2005)

Time

“All right, two dozen house specials. Any chance one of you might want to live dangerously and try a vegetable? (Aimee)
Do we look like rabbits to you? (Fury)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Bad Moon Rising

Chance

“Your success as a family… our success as a nation… depends not on what happens inside the White House, but on what happens inside your house.”

Barbara Bush (1925–2018) former First Lady of the United States

Family, Success, Dependency

“I feel horrible. She doesn't
love me and I wander around
the house like a sewing machine
that's just finished sewing
a turd to a garbage can lid.”

Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) American novelist, poet, and short story writer

Source: Trout Fishing in America / The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster / In Watermelon Sugar

Love, Feeling

“But there was more, as there always is when the love goes. She was haunted, naturally. Otherwise what is the point, why leave your rickety house, and why this yo-yo world giving us things and yanking them back?”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Source: Adverbs

Love, World, Nature

“for 100,000 (dollars), you [can] flatten a house with a wrecking ball. Imagine how much less it [takes] to destroy something than it [does] to build it in the first place.”

Jodi Picoult book Nineteen Minutes

Source: Nineteen Minutes

Imagination

“Once there had been joy, but now there was only sadness, and it was not, he knew, alone the sadness of an empty house; it was the sadness of all else, the sadness of the Earth, the sadness of the failures and the empty triumphs.”

Clifford D. Simak book City

Source: City

Sadness, Failure, Joy

“You meet a new person, you go with him and suddenly you get a whole new city… you go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn't even know were there. Everything changes.”

Samuel R. Delany book Dhalgren

Source: Dhalgren

Change, Personality

“As long as he has a house with two bathrooms. I swear to God, I don't care if he's Jack the Ripper.”

Janet Evanovich Hard Eight

Source: Hard Eight

God

“I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Speech at Amherst College

Wisdom, Beauty, Nature, Past

“And then like a song we'd forgotten was even on the mix, you stepped into the house and my whole life.”

Daniel Handler book Why We Broke Up

Source: Why We Broke Up

Life

“You know, some things don't matter that much… Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person's heart - now, matters.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Secret Life of Bees

Source: The Secret Life of Bees

Life, Color, Heart, Personality

“In my house there's this light switch that doesn't do anything. Every so often I would flick it on and off just to check. Yesterday, I got a call from a woman in Madagascar. She said”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

Light

“The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and fear.”

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) Priest and author

Truth, Fear, Light, Passion

“When we attach value to things that aren’t love—the money, the car, the house, the prestige—we are loving things that can’t love us back. We are searching for meaning in the meaningless.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

Source: Return to Love

Love, Money, Cars, Search

“All of us have moments in out lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.”

Erma Bombeck (1927–1996) When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent le…

Children, Courage

“We cannot negotiate with people who say what's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable."

[(The White House, July 25, 1961)]”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

People

“This is very domestic of you," he said. "It's kinda hot, really. Giving me all sorts of fantasies about you in an apron vacuuming my house.”

Richelle Mead Blood Promise

Source: Blood Promise

“Don't leave a piece of jewelry at his house so you can go back and get it later; he may be with his real girlfriend.”

Amy Sedaris (1961) American comedian

Source: I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence

“It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell.”

Patricia Highsmith book The Price of Salt

Source: The Price of Salt

Hell

“What on earth have you packed in here? Bricks?" asked Mo as he carried Meggie's book-box out of the house.
You're the one who says books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them," said Meggie.”

Cornelia Funke Inkheart trilogy

Source: Inkheart

Books, World, Box

“You can't blame a match for a house made of straw”

Scott Westerfeld book Goliath

Source: Goliath

“Once a president gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history.”

Doris Kearns Goodwin (1943) American biographer

History

“Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks.”

Dr. Seuss (1904–1991) American children's writer and illustrator, co-founder of Beginner Books

Books

“There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses--bound for dust--mortal”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

Men, Books, Beauty, Feeling

“Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.”

Kenneth Grahame book The Wind in the Willows

Opening lines, Ch. 1, "The River Bank"
Source: The Wind in the Willows (1908)
Context: The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.

Spring