Quotes about fireplace (30 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“I just love family meetings. Very cozy, with the Christmas garlands round the fireplace and a nice pot of tea and a detective from Scotland Yard ready to arrest you.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

Love , Family , Christmas , Tea

“I left him in his wheelchair, staring sadly into the fireplace. I wondered how many times he’d sat here, waiting for heroes that never came back.”

Rick Riordan book The Battle of the Labyrinth

Source: The Battle of the Labyrinth

Time , Waiting

“I never waited for my Irish Cream coffee to be the right temperature, with a storm happening outside and my fireplace crackling… I wrote every day, at home, in the office, whether I felt like it or not, I just did it.”

Stephen J. Cannell (1941–2010) American television producer, writer, novelist and occasional actor

Home , Coffee , Waiting

“According to Gur's theory of boredom, everything that happens in the world today is because of boredom: love, war, inventions, fake fireplaces - ninety-five percent of all that is pure boredom.”

Etgar Keret (1967) Israeli and polish writer and screenwriter

Source: The Nimrod Flipout: Stories

Love , War , World

“I am thinking,’ he remarked quietly, ’whether I shall add to the disorder in this room, by scattering your brains about the fireplace.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: The Woman in White

Thinking

“I am dying a thousand cruel and unusual deaths as fifty pairs of eyes take me in, size me up like something that should be hanging over a fireplace in a gentleman's den.”

Libba Bray A Great and Terrible Beauty

Source: A Great and Terrible Beauty

Death

“That's a lovely piece," Kat said, pointing at a Louise XV armoire near the fireplace.
The man raised his eyebrows. "Did you come to steal it?"
"Darn it," Kat said with a snap of her fingers."I knew I should have brought my big purse.”

Ally Carter book Heist Society

Source: Heist Society

Love

“I thought my fireplace dead
and stirred the ashes.
I burned my fingers.”

Antonio Machado (1875–1939) Spanish poet

Source: Border of a Dream: Selected Poems

Dead

“Take a nap in a fireplace and you'll sleep like a log.”

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

Sleep

“One afternoon, when I was four years old, my father came home, and he found me in the living room in front of a roaring fire, which made him very angry. Because we didn't have a fireplace.”

Victor Borge (1909–2000) Danish and US-American comedian and musician

Home

“The most significant gifts are the ones most easily overlooked. Small, everyday blessings: woods, health, music, laughter, memories, books, family, friends, second chances, warm fireplaces, and all the footprints scattered throughout our days.”

Sue Monk Kidd (1948) Novelist

Health , Books , Family , Music

“And I live with the dead – my mother, my sister [Sophie], my grandfather, my father [who died in 1889, when Munch was in France]... Every day is the same – my friends have stopped coming – their laughter disturbs me, tortures me.... my daily walk round the old castle becomes shorter and shorter, it tires me more and more to take walks. The fire in the fireplace is my only friend – the time I spend sitting in front of the fireplace gets longer and longer.... at its worst I lean my head against the fireplace overwhelmed by the sudden urge – Kill yourself and then it’s all over. Why live? I light the candle – my huge shadow springs across half the wall, clear up to the ceiling and in the mirror over the fireplace I see the face of my own ghost.”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

a note from Saint Cloud, 1898; as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 115
1896 - 1930

Spring , Sister , Laughter , Light

“The spider hung motionless, like a dull brown gem in an intricate necklace. The web was complete, now, the last strands laid delicately in place; it stretched from one side of the ceiling corner to the other, quivering gently in the rising air as though strummed by invisible hands.
For a moment Isgrimnur lost the thread of talk, important talk though it was. His eyes had drifted from the worried faces huddled near the fireplace in the great hall, roving up to the darkened corner, and to the tiny builder at rest.
There’s sense, he told himself. You build something and then you stay there. That’s the way it’s meant to be. Not this running here, running there, never see your blood-family or your home roofs for a year at a time.”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Chapter 37, “Jiriki’s Hunt” (p. 619).

Family , Way , Home , Sense

“It must have been in Iran that Frank Lloyd Wright got his brilliant idea for cooling a house… During the summer months, the sunken fireplace hearth was filled with water. Down-draft air movement from the chimney circulates over this pool to cool… This unusual fireplace has a summer-cooling as well as winter-heating function.”

Ken Kern American writer

The Owner Built Home: A How-to-do-it Book (1972)

Idea , Water , Winter , Summer

“After the [Wannsee] conference, Heydrich, Müller and myself sat cozily around the fireplace. We had drinks. We had brandy. We sang songs. After a while, we got up on chairs and drank a toast. Then we got up on the tables and went round and round. On the chairs. On the tables. Then we sat around peacefully, giving ourselves a rest after so many exhausting hours.”

Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer

As quoted by Alan Rosenthal, "Eichmann, Revisited" in The Jerusalem Post (20 April 2011) http://m.jpost.com/Jerusalem-Report/Jewish-World/Eichmann-Revisited.

Drink

“My job was to keep the house clean, get the children off to school, help the cook-housekeeper, and serve at table. The house was much more perfect than the sort of gilt-bordered Christmas-card-Heaven that a crooked-nosed woman would sacrifice everything to attain in the next world: it was an all-electric house, with machines being plugged in and started up all day long; there was no such thing as a fire; heat came from hot-springs underground, and the glowing embers in the fireplace were made of glass.”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

Children , World , School , Spring

“The design of a house around a massive, central fireplace has, somehow, always felt right to this writer-builder.”

Ken Kern American writer

The Owner Built Home: A How-to-do-it Book (1972)

Housing

“A good night for the fireplace to be
crackling with flames - or so he figured,
Crumpling the papers he could only see
As testimonials to long plateaus of emptiness.”

Weldon Kees (1914–1955) American artist

The Heat in the Room (Jarkko Laine: Amerikan Cowboy. Helsinki: Otava, 1981. ISBN 951-1-06597-1

Night

“Take a look at the simplest of objects. Let's take, for example, an old chair. It seems like nothing. But think of the universe comprised within it: the sweaty hands cutting the wood that used to be a robust tree, full of energy, in the middle of a luxuriant forest by some high mountains. The loving work that built it, the joyful anticipation of the one who bought it, the tired bodies it has helped, the pains and the joys it must have endured, whether in fancy halls or in a humble dining room in your neighbourhood. Everything, everything shares life and has its importance! Even the most worn down of chair carries inside the initial force of the sap climbing from the earth, out there in the forest, and will still be useful the day when, broken into kindling, it burns in some fireplace.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

describing a children's game in his essay, Tàpies suggests looking at a chair
1945 - 1970
Source: 'El joc de saber mirar' ('The Game of Knowing How to Look'), Antoni Tàpies, Cavall Fort, núm 82, Barcelona, gener de 1967 - translated from Catalan; as quoted in: 'Tàpies: From Within', June ─ November, 2013 - Presse Release, Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC )p. 16, note 9

Love , Life , Pain , Mountain

“As far back as 1624… Louis Savot invented the first heat-circulating fireplace. His unit was installed in the Louvre, Paris, and became the prototype for Ben Franklin's 1742 Pennsylvania stove. The 1624 French fireplace achieved 30 to 45 percent more efficiency than do most American tract home fireplaces of today! Savot surrounded the grate of his creation with a metal chamber, which had warm air outlets above the fire opening. He also supplied the fire with air from under the floor. Thus, room drafts were reduced and combustion efficiency was further improved. Few people are aware that practically all of the technical features of Franklin's Pennsylvania stove were copied from earlier inventors.”

Ken Kern American writer

The Owner Built Home: A How-to-do-it Book (1972)

People , Home

“Cooling by evaporation of water or by fans and warming by heaters and fireplaces are artificial aids… From a practical, economic, or aesthetic point of view it makes much more sense to develop, where possible, constructional features for warming or cooling the owner-built home.”

Ken Kern American writer

The Owner Built Home: A How-to-do-it Book (1972)

Home , Sense , Water

“I don't approve of open fires. You can't think, or talk or even make love in front of a fireplace. All you can do is stare at it.”

Rex Stout (1886–1975) American writer

Life, "Author Rex Stout vs. the F.B.I."

Love , Making love , Thinking

“After a year of working in the restaurant, one night I decided to slip Tom my telephone number. We were standing in front of the giant fireplace. 'Did you hear I was single?' I asked. The next day his secretary called me and said, 'Mr. Girardi would like to know if you're free to have dinner this evening.' 'Absolutely not,' I told her. 'Tell Mr. Girardi if he wants to take me out on a date, he needs to call me himself and ask me and give me enough time to prepare.' You know how men are, especially if they are successful. They expect you to drop everything right away. That's not how I work, I don't care who you are. He did call me back himself, and he asked me out on a date like a gentleman.”

Erika Jayne (1969) American singer, actress and television personality

pg. 146
Pretty Mess book (2018)

Men , Time , Success , Night

“Around the middle of February, I called on Goering one evening in Karinhall. I had discovered from studying the military map that he had concentrated his parachute division around his hunting estate. For a long time he had been made the scapegoat for all the failures of the Luftwaffe. At the situation conferences Hitler habitually denounced him in the most violent and insulting language before the assembled officers. He must have been even nastier in the scenes he had with Goering privately. Often, waiting in the anteroom, I could hear Hitler shouting at him. That evening in Karinhall, I established a certain intimacy with Goering for the first and only time. Goering had an excellent Rotschild-Lafite served at the fireplace and ordered the servant not to disturb us. Candidly, I described my disappointment with Hitler. Just as candidly, Goering replied that he well understood me and that he often felt much the same. However, he said, it was easier for me, since I had joined Hitler a great deal later and could free myself from him all the sooner. He, Goering, had much closer ties with Hitler; many years of common experiences and struggles had bound them together- and he could no longer break loose.”

Albert Speer (1905–1981) German architect, Minister of Armaments and War Production for Nazi Germany

Source: Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (1970), p. 426

Disappointment , Failure , Study , Time

“All these people come to see the White House and they see practically nothing that dates back before 1948. Every boy who comes here should see things that develop his sense of history. For the girls, the house should look beautiful and lived-in. They should see what a fire in the fireplace and pretty flowers can do for a house; the White House rooms should give them a sense of all that. Everything in the White House must have a reason for being there. It would be sacrilege merely to "redecorate" it -- a word I hate. It must be restored -- and that has nothing to do with decoration. That is a question of scholarship.”

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929–1994) public figure, First Lady to 35th U.S. President John F. Kennedy

Interview with Hugh Sidey, according to Kennedy Library https://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/Jacqueline-Kennedy-in-the-White-House.aspx (1 September 1961)

Hate , People , Beauty , History

“Our society, it turns out, can use modern art. A restaurant, today, will order a mural by Míro in as easy and matter-of-fact a spirit as, twenty-five years ago, it would have ordered one by Maxfield Parrish. The president of a paint factory goes home, sits down by his fireplace—it looks like a chromium aquarium set into the wall by a wall-safe company that has branched out into interior decorating, but there is a log burning in it, he calls it a firelace, let’s call it a fireplace too—the president sits down, folds his hands on his stomach, and stares at two paintings by Jackson Pollock that he has hung on the wall opposite him. He feels at home with them; in fact, as he looks at them he not only feels at home, he feels as if he were back at the paint factory. And his children—if he has any—his children cry for Calder. He uses thoroughly advanced, wholly non-representational artists to design murals, posters, institutional advertisements: if we have the patience (or are given the opportuity) to wait until the West has declined a little longer, we shall all see the advertisements of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, and Smith illustrated by Jean Dubuffet.
This president’s minor executives may not be willing to hang a Kandinsky in the house, but they will wear one, if you make it into a sport shirt or a pair of swimming-trunks; and if you make it into a sofa, they will lie on it. They and their wives and children will sit on a porcupine, if you first exhibit it at the Museum of Modern Art and say that it is a chair. In fact, there is nothing, nothing in the whole world that someone won’t buy and sit in if you tell him it is a chair: the great new art form of our age, the one that will take anything we put in it, is the chair. If Hieronymus Bosch, if Christian Morgenstern, if the Marquis de Sade were living at this hour, what chairs they would be designing!”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Taste of the Age”, pp. 19–20
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

Children , Lie , Age , World

“The most noteworthy development of the open fireplace took place in 1796, when Englishman Count Rumford published his comprehensive essay, "Chimney Fireplaces."… the inclined fireback… increased fireplace efficiency by providing an area of greater radiation. For the purpose of breaking up the current of smoke in the event of chimney down draft, the back smoke shelf of Rumford's improved fireplace ended abruptly—a practice strictly adhered to by fireplace masons to this day.”

Ken Kern American writer

The Owner Built Home: A How-to-do-it Book (1972)

“A woman who taught at Berkeley dropped in on me once and saw a book burning in the fireplace. She pointed at it in terror, and I explained that it was a crummy ghostwritten life of a movie star and that it was an act of sanitation to burn it rather than sending it out into the world which was already clogged with too many copies of it. But she said, "You shouldn’t burn books" and began to cry.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

The New Republic, December 24, 1966

Life , Books , World , Star

“One day I was sitting one side of the fireplace, and my wife was sitting on the other, and I suddenly said to her, “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to write a story about some boys on an island, showing how they would really behave, being boys and not little saints as they usually are in children’s books.” And she said, “That’s a first-class idea! You write it!””

William Golding (1911–1993) British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate

So I went ahead and wrote it.
Introduction to his reading https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYnfSV27vLY of Lord of the Flies in the unabridged audio version (1980)

Children , Books , Boy , Idea

“In the winter on a Sunday afternoon, I can spend six hours in front of the fireplace, just looking at the flames and thinking. In the evening, I’m drunk with beautiful thoughts. My wife says to me, ‘What are you looking at?’ I say, ‘The fire.’ We have to take a step backward.”

Brunello Cucinelli (1953) Italian entrepreneur and philanthropist

Source: 10 Productivity Tips From the King of Cashmere, Brunello Cucinelli https://medium.com/@om/10-productivity-tips-from-the-king-of-cashmere-brunello-cucinelli-79c9cf74d9de Medium, Om Malik, April 27, 2015

Beauty , Thinking , Winter