Quotes & Sayings About Furnishings

Since sane people rarely surround themselves with furnishings which they personally find repellent, it is logical to assume that it will generate a bit of goodwill to enthuse about those they have ... — Anne Morice

He had come to us only three years earlier, but had already won general sympathy, mainly because he "knew how to bring society together." His house was never without guests, and it seemed he would have been unable to live without them. He had to have guests to dinner every day, even if only two, even if only one, but without guests he would not sit down to eat. He gave formal dinners, too, under all sorts of pretexts, sometimes even the most unexpected. The food he served, though not refined, was abundant, the cabbage pies were excellent, and the wines made up in quantity for what they lacked in quality. In the front room stood a billiard table, surrounded by quite decent furnishings; that is, there were even paintings of English racehorses in black frames on the walls, which, as everyone knows, constitute a necessary adornment of any billiard room in a bachelor's house. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Designing for children carries a social responsibility beyond bright colors and scaled-down furnishings that only perceptive and informed grown-ups can understand. — Sharon Exley

The room was not impressively large, even by Manhattan apartment-house standards, but its accumulated furnishings might have lent a snug appearance to a banquet hall in Valhalla. — J.D. Salinger

When Zhuangzi was about to die, his disciples expressed a desire to give him a sumptuous burial. Zhuangzi said, I will have heaven and earth for my coffin and coffin shell, the sun and moon for my pair of jade discs, the stars and constellations for my pearls and beads, and the ten thousand things for my parting gifts. The furnishings for my funeral are already prepared - what is there to add? — Zhuangzi

To create an atmosphere dedicated to health..to present charming interiors that will attract maternity patients ... to develop distinctive decoration and furnishings that can be installed at modest expenditure - and will require a minimum of maintenance costs. — Dorothy Draper

Mrs. B's story is well-known but worth telling again. She came to the United States 77 years ago, unable to speak English and devoid of formal schooling. In 1937, she founded the Nebraska Furniture Mart with $500. Last year the store had sales of $200 million, a larger amount by far than that recorded by any other home furnishings store in the United States. Our part in all of this began ten years ago when Mrs. B sold control of the business to Berkshire Hathaway, a deal we completed without obtaining audited financial statements, checking real estate records, or getting any warranties. In short, her word was good enough for us. Naturally, I was delighted to attend Mrs. B's birthday party. After all, she's promised to attend my 100th. — Warren Buffett

He asked, looking at her dark-rimmed eyes, "You do not sleep?"
She shivered. "No. I do not want to sleep any more. I sleep too much already. It is so cold, where Quincy sends me in my sleep. Deep into the house, farther in, not into the house we see. It is as if that house were a face, and when you see a face you can't see the brain or the thoughts of the person behind it. And it is so strange - the house inside the house."
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"How is it strange - this that you call the house inside the house?"
She said vaguely, her eyes growing glassy, "Strange. Shapes change, and sizes. The rooms are different: bigger and blacker and longer and the shadows are full of things. Creatures - or sometimes the rooms get smaller, fewer, and the furnishings change and change, like the scenes in a kaleidoscope, and I see the people in the portraits walking about in them. — Evangeline Walton

We live in a uniform civilization, within well-defined cultural models: furnishings, decorative elements, blankets, record player have all been chosen among a certain number of given possibilities. What can they reveal to you about what she is really like? — Italo Calvino

The Goliath Corporation was to altruism what Genghis Khan was to soft furnishings. — Jasper Fforde

Gen. George S. Patton Jr. fears no one. But now he sleeps flat on his back in a hospital bed. His upper body is encased in plaster, the result of a car accident twelve days ago. Room 110 is a former utility closet, just fourteen feet by sixteen feet. There are no decorations, pictures on the walls, or elaborate furnishings - just the narrow bed, white walls, and a single high window. A chair has been brought in for Patton's wife, Beatrice, who endured a long, white-knuckle flight over the North Atlantic from the family home in Boston to be at his bedside. She sits there now, crochet hook moving silently back and forth, raising her eyes every few moments to see if her husband has awakened. — Bill O'Reilly

The town, although it had "suffered greatly," was not in as bad shape as he had expected, he wrote to John Hancock, "and I have a particular pleasure in being able to inform you, sir, that your house has received no damage worth mentioning." Other fine houses had been much abused by the British, windows broken, furnishings smashed or stolen, books destroyed. But at Hancock's Beacon Hill mansion all was in order, as General Sullivan also attested, and there was a certain irony in this, since the house had been occupied and maintained by the belligerent General James Grant, who had wanted to lay waste to every town on the New England coast. "Though I believe," wrote Sullivan, "the brave general had made free with some of the articles in the [wine] cellar. — David McCullough

Every word that he had spoken amongst the amassed beauties of Macmaster furnishings had been a link in a love-speech. It was not merely that he had confessed to her as he would have to no other soul in the world - 'To no other soul in the world,' he had said! - his doubts, his misgivings, and his fears; it was that every word he uttered and that came to her, during the lasting of that magic, had sung of passion. If he had uttered the word 'Come', she would have followed him to the bitter ends of the earth; if he had said, 'There is no hope', she would have known the finality of despair. Having said neither, she knew: 'This is our condition; so we must continue!' And she knew, too, that he was telling her that he, like her, was ... oh, say, on the side of the angels. — Ford Madox Ford

When Stephen comes into a room, the furnishings shrink from him. Chairs scuttle backwards. Joint-stools flatten themselves like pissing bitches. The woollen Bible figures in the king's tapestries lift their hands to cover their ears. — Hilary Mantel

The high stone fireplace, the heavy walnut tables, the fringed Oriental rug, the leather furniture. The air definitely came alive, but Willie felt out of place. Not because of any excessive luxury-the furnishings, while meticulously preserved, were still scarred and worn, but they seemed to suspend him in another time. Why, it was like walking into a movie set for Wuthering Heights. — Gloria Naylor

When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence. — Zoe Heller

The real heretic is not the atheist or agnostic (who are often decent people) but those who murmur "it doesn't matter what you believe, as long as it makes you feel good." This turns religion into a subjective matter, like taste in furnishings, and robs theology of its claim to ultimate truth. — Sydney J. Harris

Living room by a curtain of colored beads. The room's furnishings consisted of a table, an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, — Paulo Coelho

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 then," said Sarnac, "I remember that I made a prophecy. I made it - when did I make it? Two thousand years ago? Or two weeks ago? I sat in Fanny's little sitting-room, an old-world creature amidst her old-world furnishings, and I said that men and women would not always suffer as we were suffering then. I said that we were still poor savages, living only in the bleak dawn of civilisation, and that we suffered because we were under-bred, under-trained and darkly ignorant of ourselves, that the mere fact that we knew our own unhappiness was the promise of better things and that a day would come when charity and understanding would light the world so that men and women would no longer hurt themselves and one another as they were doing now everywhere, universally, in law and in restriction and in jealousy and in hate, all round and about the earth. — H.G.Wells

A lot of people worry about
the ' wear and tear ' on furnishings.
I feel it's more a matter
of people treating the things that surround them
with respect. — Albert Hadley

The Creation is quite like a spacious and splendid house, provided and filled with the most exquisite, and at the same time, the most abundant furnishings. Everything in it tells of God. — John Calvin

Your mind, which is yourself, can be likened to a house. The first necessary move then, is to rid that house of all but furnishings essential to success. — John McDonald

Thereafter he gave up on a career in the arts and filled a succession of unsuitable vacancies and equally unsuitable women, falling in love whenever he took up a new job, and falling out of love - or more correctly being fallen out of love with - every time he moved on. He drove a removal van, falling in love with the first woman whose house he emptied, delivered milk in an electric float, falling in love with the cashier who paid him every Friday night, worked as an assistant to an Italian carpenter who replaced sash windows in Victorian houses and replaced Julian Treslove in the affections of the cashier, managed a shoe department in a famous London store, falling in love with the woman who managed soft furnishings on the floor above. — Howard Jacobson

But even if every house looked identical-if all the furnishings were the same- it still wouldn't feel like yours.
That's because home isn't where you are. It's who you're with. — Jodi Picoult

Naturalists claim that however much the female may be said to love the accoutrements of fashion and furnishings, it is the male who is driven to display himself. — Kate Elliott

If Lenin walked around the offices of a company like Yahoo or Intel or Cisco, he'd think communism had won. Everyone would be wearing the same clothes, have the same kind of office (or rather, cubicle) with the same furnishings, and address one another by their first names instead of by honorifics. Everything would seem exactly as he'd predicted, until he looked at their bank accounts. Oops. — Paul Graham

There was talk of the Centaur being moved into the elephant cages to make room for a banjo-picking Minotaur. Surrendering his meager furnishings to a musical half man half bull was all bull. — Don Roff

A mind, like a home, is furnished by its owner, so if one's life is cold and bare he can blame none but himself. You have a chance to select from pretty elegant furnishings. — Louis L'Amour

Even his initial stirrings of domesticity had some quirks. He bought a proper house in the Los Gatos hills, which he adorned with a Maxfield Parrish painting, a Braun coffeemaker, and Henckels knives. But because he was so obsessive when it came to selecting furnishings, it remained mostly barren, lacking beds or chairs or couches. Instead his bedroom had a mattress in the center, framed pictures of Einstein and Maharaj-ji on the walls, and an Apple II on the floor. — Anonymous

If we can say with Seneca, "This life is only a prelude to eternity," then we need not worry so much over the fittings and furnishings of this ante-room; and more than that, it will give dignity and purpose to the fleeting days to know they are linked with the eternal things as prelude and preparation. — Minot Judson Savage

The furnishings she'd chosen reminded him of the woman who lived here. Nothing to admire, and yet he wished to be here. To stay here and be surrounded by rooms that settled him. He was at ease, and the longer he stayed, the more he found to like. — Carolyn Jewel

We can make a little order where we are, and then the big sweep of history on which we can have no effect doesn't overwhelm us. We do it with colors, with a garden, with the furnishings of a room, or with sounds and words. We make a little form, and we gain composure. — Robert Frost

Even one's own home is a kind of anthology of advertisers, manufacturers, motifs and presentation techniques. There's nothing 'natural' about one's home these days. The furnishings, the fabrics, the furniture, the appliances, the TV, and all the electronic equipment - we're living inside commercials. — J.G. Ballard

At first glance, Martha Stewart, queen of artfully distressed home furnishings, might not seem to have much in common with Michael R. Milken, one-time king of junk bonds. — Alex Berenson

In China there was once a man who liked pictures of dragons, and his clothing and furnishings were all designed accordingly. His deep affection for dragons was brought to the attention of the dragon god, and onde day a real dragon appeared before his window. It is said that he died of fright. He was probably a man who always spoke big words but acted differently when facing the real thing. — Yamamoto Tsunetomo

When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke's commode. The main hall was mysteriously floor less. Most of the rooms were painted pink. The one upstairs room in which the Duke had resided was packed to the ceiling with hundreds of green boxes, each of which contained a single dark brown wig. This was, in short, a man worth getting to know. — Bill Bryson

The archaeologists who will come and blow away the ashes from our house will unearth only the metal parts of the sophisticated furnishings, and it will take them some time to reconstruct their original beauty; they will find very few objects and almost no embellishments, not even in Emanuele's room, which from year to year is being emptied of toys and colors, because everything that's important to him is now found in the circuits of a tablet. I wonder what would suggest to them that a couple and then a family had lived in those rooms and that they were happy together, at least for long stretches of time. — Paolo Giordano

Edison pressed on and designed a range of concrete furnishings - bureaus, cupboards, chairs, even a concrete piano - to go with his concrete houses. He promised that soon he would offer, for just $5, a double bed that would never wear out. The entire range was to be unveiled at a cement industry show in New York in 1912. In the event, when the show opened, the Edison stand was bare. No one from the Edison company ever offered an explanation. It was the last anyone ever heard of concrete furniture. As far as is known, Edison never discussed the matter. A — Bill Bryson

He pictured her living alone in that tranquil house with its fine old furnishings, tending her flowers and fruit trees. — Julia Glass

On hashish, he saw the elaborate furnishings of the nineteenth-century bourgeois interior concentrating to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm ... To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider's web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry. — Daniel Pinchbeck

The gardens of my youth were fragrant gardens and it is their sweetness rather than their patterns of their furnishings that I now most clearly recall. — Louise Wilder

There was a shortage of soft furnishings and I'm sorry to say I was forced to use hard liquor. — D.L. Christopher

My directors of photography light my films, but the colours of the sets, furnishings, clothes, hairstyles - that's me. Everything that's in front of the camera, I bring you. — Pedro Almodovar

She haunted the makeup department until she was bored, then took a look around home furnishings. She wasn't ever going to get another dining room table, but really, there wasn't any harm in lookng ... — Neil Gaiman

Furniture is like that. Used and enjoyed as intended, it absorbs the experience and exudes it back into the atmosphere, but if simply bought for effect and left to languish in a corner, it vibrates with melancholy. Furnishings in museums ... are as unspeakably tragic as the unvisited inmates of old folk's homes. The untuned violins and hardback books used to bring 'character' to postwar suburban pubs crouch uncomfortably in their imposed roles like caged pumas in a zoo. The stately kitchen that is never or rarely used to bring forth lavish feasts for appreciative audiences turns inward and cold. — Will Wiles

Hear my wife speak of John Lewis and you might picture a stately pleasure dome of ornamental cascades and hanging gardens, staffed by muscular Centaurs who know all there is to know about kitchenware and soft furnishings. But really it's just a big hall full of wanky chrome fridges. — Tim Moore

Things that seem too common: too many furnishings where one is sitting; too many brushes around an inkstone; too many Buddhas in a home chapel; too many stones and trees and bushes in a garden courtyard; too many children and grandchildren in a house; too many words used when talking to people; too much praise for oneself in a written petition.
Things that don't offend good taste even if numerous: books ... — Yoshida Kenko

Or maybe a ghost was only a thing that endures, like the furnishings of this room, like the chairs or table; a little worse for wear, but still here because someone cherished it, or because it was made of such hardy stuff that time couldn't wear it down fast enough. — Ari Berk

Our clothing, our food, our household furnishings - all could be much simpler than they now are and at the same time be better looking — Henry Ford

When his mind turned to look back at the memories of a life gone off the track, everything appeared murky, like looking through a stagnant pond, covered completely with green algae, black beneath with the overabundance of bacteria and rot that made it incapable of supporting any other life besides. Through the murk he saw love, love that wasn't cultivated, love that was left to wither and die on the vine in his vain attempt to find happiness. Happiness that he didn't even know he might have had in his hands, had he done his part.
He saw missed opportunities, roads not taken, chances that asked too much of him. And his life, like a beautiful room that slowly emptied of all furnishings until it came down to only himself and the worn soiled carpet beneath him, the walls darkening to make the hell he thought would be his happiness - the hell that was his life. — Jason Huffman-Black

I mean, I kind of feel alphas are the romance equivalent of an impulse buy. It looks great in the shop but then you get home and it's like where am I going to put this thing? It doesn't go with my furnishings and it keeps trying to kiss me punishingly. — Alexis Hall

Much like the fortified wine that gives Marsala its name, this tasteful hue embodies the satisfying richness of a fulfilling meal, while its grounding red-brown roots emanate a sophisticated, natural earthiness. This hearty, yet stylish tone is universally appealing and translates easily to fashion, beauty, industrial design, home furnishings and interiors. — Leatrice Eiseman

Marie-Laure sits in her customary spot in the corner of the kitchen, closest to the fireplace, and listens to the friends of Melanie Manec complain ... Nine of them sit around the square table, knees pressed to knees. Ration card restrictions, abysmal puddings, the deteriorating quality of fingernail varnish - these are crimes they feel in their souls. To hear so many of them in a room together confuses and excites Marie-Laure: they are giddy when they should be serious, somber after jokes; Madame Hebrard cries over the nonavailability of Demerara sugar, another woman's complaint about tobacco disintegrates mid sentence into hysterics about the phenomenal size of the perfumer's backside. They smell of stale bread, of stuffy living rooms crammed with dark titanic Breton furnishings. — Anthony Doerr

When your mother doesn't want to have the sex talk with you any more but instead wants to talk about the possibility that you might have sex on her soft furnishings, it's a watershed moment in any girl's life. I know I'll remember it fondly for many years to come. — Sarra Manning

Instead, the room, which had seen her grow to maturity, would see her dry up and fade. The gilt mirror in the corner would bear its dispassionate testimony. All the ornaments and furnishings would be her companions through the years to come. And she realized that she would come to hate them, if she didn't already hate them, as one hates the witnesses of one's humiliation and futility. — Winston Graham

The day of her long interview with Tietjens, amongst the amassed beauties of Macmaster furnishings, she marked in the calendar of her mind as her great love scene. That had been two years ago; he had been going into the army. Now he was going out again. From that she knew what a love scene was. It passed without mention of the word 'love'; it passed in impulses; warmths; rigors of the skin. Yet with every word they had said to each other they had confessed their love; in that way, when you listen to the nightingale you hear the expressed craving of your lover beating upon your heart. — Ford Madox Ford

The clandestine operation tucked several floors below ground level inside a Los Angeles high-rise had never before made her queasy. Today the copper walls, marble flooring, refrigerated temperature and minimal furnishings took discomfort to a new level. She'd swear Alien was about to burst from her belly. — Robin Bielman