Abandoned House Quotes & Sayings

The moment you let your courage leave you, you turn to an abandoned old house! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

In a blacked-out house, stripped of all comforts, it's easy to turn your anger outward, to attack this city he's lying at the center of, with its filth and its pollution and its oppression, but really, New York is the only thing that's never abandoned him. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Sometimes people can hunger for more than bread.
It is possible that our children, our husband, our wife, do not hunger for bread, do not need clothes, do not lack a house. But are we equally sure that none of them feels alone, abandoned, neglected, needing some affection? That, too, is poverty — Mother Teresa

A stranger hurrying as fast as he could over the icy sidewalks looked in. He saw a circle of singing people bathed in the clean white light from a tree, and his heart did a somersault, and the image stayed with him; it merged with him even as he came home to his own children, who were already sleeping in their beds, to his wife crossly putting together the tricycle without the screwdriver that he'd run out to borrow. It remained long after his children ripped open their gifts and abandoned their toys in puddles of paper and grew too old for them and left their house and parents and childhoods, so that he and his wife gaped at each other in bewilderment as to how it had happened so terribly swiftly. All those years, the singers in the soft light in the basement apartment crystallized in his mind, became the very idea of what happiness should look like. — Lauren Groff

Just looking at her mother made Cami think about how having another mouth to feed in the house would be a huge burden. She was working her butt off at two jobs already as a registered nurse and a waitress. With a mortgage payment, student loan debt, credit card debt, and loads of other bills that she once did not think about twice, her mother was forced to work longer hours after her now ex-husband abandoned his family for another woman. — Valenciya Lyons

You are wise as well as short."
"I can also break bricks with my bare hands."
"That's a handy skill if you ever find yourself walled up in the basement of an abandoned house by a psychopath. — Nora Roberts

I'll see you at your funeral, if you'll see me at mine. I'll wait at the edges for your ghost to rise (until the end of time). We'll find someplace nice to haunt, an abandoned beach house filled with memories of summer sunburns. Children will giggle as we tickle their feet at night and they'll never know the bad dreams we fight. We'll make our own heaven. Walking in places we used to walk until death, dies. — Pleasefindthis

the ideas of ravacious herds of feral domesticated housepets and oversized insects not only taking over the abandoned homes of relocated Americans but actually setting up house and keeping them in model repair and impressive equity, — David Foster Wallace

What I see as the particularly exciting prospect for writing horror fiction as we go forward is setting stories in more internal landscapes than external ones, mapping out the mind as the home for scary things instead of the house at the end of the lane or lakeside campground or abandoned amusement park. — Andrew Pyper

Then life began, and since then we remember each dumpster, abandoned house, and foot-chase by retail security. At night, after running around, plotting and scheming, our checklist items all crossed out, we paused to think - 'What to do tomorrow?' and the answer was always, 'As we please ... — CrimethInc.

Stepping into the smell of a long-abandoned aple crop, Cameron called towards the house, hoping to catch his mother's attention in the window where she would be sitting working — Rebecca Stott

Your twin brother is, as you said, an abandoned house. If no one is home, then someone is missing. So you grieve. — Wally Lamb

He sat by a gray window in the gray light in an abandoned house in the late afternoon and read old newspapers while the boy slept. The curious news. The quaint concerns. — Cormac McCarthy

The body lay outside an abandoned, boarded-up theater. The theater had started as a first-run movie house, many years back when the neighborhood had still been fashionable. As the neighborhood began rotting, the theater began showing second-run films, and then old movies, and finally foreign-language films. — Ed McBain

Certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather than arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark desolation. The sight of such endless avenues of fishy-eyed vacancy and death, and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given over to cob-webs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse. — H.P. Lovecraft

They found the woman's body
under the porch of an abandoned
house," Mary told me on the
second floor of the bookstore.

"She had been preparing a meal
and discovered she lacked one
of the ingredients. She was one
her way to the store when she
disappeared."

Mary began to sob as she read me
the newspaper story.

"I just wish I knew what she
had been preparing. I want
to finish it for her so much. — Whit Griffin

Time is irrelevant in Bliss House. BLISS HOUSE, the first novel in the series, is mostly set in the present. CHARLOTTE'S STORY takes place in 1957. A third novel, THE ABANDONED HEART (available 2016), will tell the story of the house's first residents. (You'll find excerpts from BLISS HOUSE and CHARLOTTE'S STORY in the back of this ebook.) — Laura Benedict

I realized about a month ago that there's a last time everyone skips across a street. And that most people I know have already skipped for the last time and don't know it.

From here on out it will always be walking or running, growing older and buying things at the store or seeing friends or going to work, but never again will life impel them to skip. When I thought of this, the tragedy of it overwhelmed me so that I skipped all the way home from my friend's house.

Skipping is a strange thing. Because it means something. Like trains make the sound of leaving. Skipping is the motion of being totally free, childlike, abandoned of self and to self.

But I learned something else about skipping. You can't fake it. Or make it happen. It must be something that happens to you. (pp. 152-153) — Heather Harpham Kopp

I'm sorry your chair collapsed, but the furnishings are in as poor repair as the roof."
He retrieved his abandoned glass of sherry.
"I assume the rook leaks."
"Only when it rains."
His eyes warmed with laughter as he watched her over the rim of his glass. "I'm surprised you countenance this place."
"I'm here for my father. Once he returns and you take the house, I will be on my way."
"May I ask where?"
"Italy,perhaps. Or France." She shrugged. "I haven't yet decided."
"I love Italy." His voice deepened the faintest bit. "I imagine Italy would love you,too. — Karen Hawkins

And that is how someone who is unusally susceptible to nightmares, night terrors, the Creeps, the Willies and the Seeing Things That Aren't Really There talks himself into making one last trip to the abandoned, almost-certainly-haunted house where a dozen or more children met their untimely end. — Ransom Riggs

A marriage was like a house under constant construction, each year seeing the completion of new rooms. A first-year marriage was a cottage; one that had gone on for twenty-seven years was a huge and rambling mansion. There were bound to be crannies and storage spaces, most of them dusty and abandoned, some containing a few unpleasant relics you would just as soon you hadn't found. But that was no biggie. You either threw those relics out or took them to Goodwill. — Stephen King

We dressed ourselves up as Gauguin pictures and careered round Crosby Hall. Mrs. Whitehead was scandalized. She said that Vanessa and I were practically naked. My mother's ghost was invoked once more ... to deplore the fact that I had taken a house in Brunswick Square and had asked young men to share it ... Stories began to circulate about parties at which we all undressed in public. Logan Pearsall Smith told Ethel Sands that he knew for a fact that Maynard had copulated with Vanessa on a sofa in the middle of the drawing room. It was a heartless, immoral, cynical society it was said; we were abandoned women and our friends were the most worthless of young men. — Virginia Woolf

Every small town has at least one house the children whisper about; the type of house that has always been abandoned; where the once pristine white paint has faded to a grimy gray; where the windows are boarded, and the lawn never grows; where children hold their breath and close their eyes as they pass by. A house that sounds like it contains an army of whispering spirits when the wind whistles through the nearby trees.

In the town of Blackwood, that house could be found on Creep Street. It had stood there as long as he could remember. — The Blood Brothers

Here in the shadow of the firs lay everything the old house had spat out in the course of its life, everything worn out and unnecessary, everything not to be seen. In the darkening winter evening, this landscape was utterly abandoned, a territory that had no meaning for anyone but him. He found it beautiful. — Tove Jansson

If an important decision is to be made, they [the Persians] discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day the master of the house where the discussion was held submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober, is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk. — Herodotus

That brow arched once more. "Does it? You think people will believe it when the truth is that I ruined you on an abandoned estate before your father stormed the house with a rifle?"
She hesitated. "I would not call it storming."
"He fired several rounds at my house. If that isn't storming, I don't know what is. — Sarah MacLean

My wife Ann and I had been digging during the day, transplanting lilies from the front of this abandoned farmhouse back down the road to where we live. We finished. She was tired and laid in the grass. I took a picture. The house is now gone. The walnut trees have been bulldozed and burned. I saw this picture the other day for the first time in years and realized how photographing life within a hundred yards of my front porch had helped me focus on everything I cared about. — Larry Towell

There was never any peace. There were never any quiet, family moments. They were always working. All of them, all the time. For some reason Michael saw an image of the sitting room at the house in Yorkshire. The TV was on, but there was no one watching it. The terrier was polishing off a plate of dinner that had been abandoned on the arm of the couch. That was the way their lives were. They hadn't sat down to a meal once since they arrived in Scotland. They were a dealer's yard, not a family. — Kate Thompson

Suppose it was even as you think," he went on, even more gently. "Suppose that all you say was a fact, and that our Elders were but greedy tyrants, ourselves abandoned here by their selfish will and set to fulfill a false and prideful purpose. No." Jamethon's voice rose. "Let me attest as if it were only for myself. Suppose that you could give me proof that all our Elders lied, that our very Covenant was false. Suppose that you could prove to me" - his face lifted to mine and his voice drove at me - "that all was perversion and falsehood, and nowhere among the Chosen, not even in the house of my father, was there faith or hope! If you could prove to me that no miracle could save me, that no soul stood with me, and that opposed were all the legions of the universe, still I, I alone, Mr. Olyn, would go forward as I have been commanded, to the end of the universe, to the culmination of eternity. For without my faith I am but common earth. But with my faith, there is no power can stay me! — Gordon R. Dickson

These houses were thirty, forty years old. People must have died, had babies, gotten engaged, married, divorced, hurt each other in a thousand ways, reconciled and forgiven, passionately hated and desperately loved; if you abandoned a house whenever something significant happened, people would live in tents. This house had known life. — Sonja Condit

I discovered a small kitten in the garden, which apparently had been abandoned by its mother. I picked it up and noticed that its hind legs were crippled in just the same way as Tsering's were when she died. I took this creature into my house and looked after it until eventually it was able to walk. Like Tsering, she was also female, but very beautiful and even more gentle. She also got along very well with the two dogs, particularly Sangye, against whose furry chest she liked to lie. — Dalai Lama XIV

A necklace of pearls on a white neck.
We had lost the sense of discovery which had infused the anarchy of our first year. I began to settle down.
... the old house in the foreground, the rest of the world abandoned and forgotten; a world of its own of peace and love and beauty ... — Evelyn Waugh

The first of these houses appeared to be occupied. The next two were vacant. Dingy curtains, soot-grey against their snowy window-sills, hung over the next. A litter of paper and refuse-abandoned by the last long gust of wind that must have come whistling round the nearer angle of the house - lay under the broken flight of steps up to a mid-Victorian porch. The small snow clinging to the bricks and to the worn and weathered cement of the wall only added to its gaunt lifelessness. (Bad Company — Walter De La Mare

Day after day we looked for rain, and day after day we saw nothing but the sun. Lavender that we had planted in the spring died. The patch of grass in front of the house abandoned its ambitions to become a lawn and turned into the dirty yellow of poor straw. The earth shrank, revealing its knuckles and bones, rocks and roots that had been invisible before. — Peter Mayle

Tomorrow will probably be another day like today. Happiness will never come my way. I know that. But it's probably best to go to sleep believing that it will surely come, tomorrow it will come. I purposely made a loud thump as I fell into bed. Ah, that feels good. The futon was cool, just the right temperature against my back, and it was simply delightful. Sometimes happiness arrives one night too late. The thought occurred to me as I lay there. You wait and wait for happiness, and when finally you can't bear it any longer, you rush out of the house, only to hear later that a marvelous happiness arrived the following day at the home you had abandoned, and now it was too late. Sometimes happiness arrives one night too late. Happiness... I — Osamu Dazai

There is a streetlight in front of Soo Yeon's house. From there to home, it takes 280 steps. If we have been walking away from each other for 14 years, how many steps will it take to get back? If she doesn't come even if I wait, that doesn't mean that she abandoned me.. it means she is on her way. — Ha Jung-woo

The act of dreaming, like a draught of fresh air in an abandoned house, situates the furniture of the mind in a new ambiance. — Henry Miller

Ahab saw Elijah, Ahab said to him, j "Is it you, you k troubler of Israel?" 18And he answered, "I have not troubled Israel, but you have, and your father's house, because you have l abandoned the commandments of the LORD and m followed the Baals. — Anonymous

You were heavily armed with faith, and that made your heart a castle. My heart, by contrast, is an abandoned house whose windows are shattered and doors unhinged. Ghosts play inside it, and the winds wail. As — Sinan Antoon

I noticed that in a corner, across from where they ate with such innocent relish, sitting forlorn and abandoned, was the ghost of their son. He had lost both of his arms, one side of his face was squashed, and both his eyes had burst. He had bluish wings. He was the saddest ghost in the house. — Ben Okri

It's impossible to predict which paintings will last and which won't. In New Orleans I painted on a dilapidated shop in a street littered with abandoned cars and rotting mattresses, then two hours later the piece was gone. It turned out I'd picked the side of a crack house and the proprietor didn't like the attention. — Banksy

Under this [Bush] Administration, America's middle class has been abandoned
its dreams denied, its Main Street interests ignored and its mainstream values scorned by a White House that puts privilege first. — John F. Kerry

The trouble with friends was that you couldn't get rid of them. There was no way to take back a friendship in the wake of betrayal or disappointment. The friendship, and everything that went with it, stayed. It just became unreliable, like an abandoned house; you still knew where all the rooms were, and which stairs creaked underfoot, but you had to check every floorboard for rot before trusting your weight to it. — Chris Moriarty