House Not A Home Quotes & Sayings

The truth is, new furniture or a better house will never really satisfy - they will just set new, higher standards for what is acceptable to us for our comfort and contentment. When you take care of what you have and find joy right where you are, you set the right tone and expectations for contentment in all circumstances moving forward. Whether things get better or worse, our standard will be to love what we have and be grateful for it (even when we might not like it). — Melissa Michaels

In my house, I'm not allowed to shout at anybody. It's very strict. It's a very Christian home. — Joel Courtney

Hester Landon, independent, invincible, indestructible. Who might have died after a terrible fall, if not for a neighbor - and her own indefatigable will. Now she reigned in a suite of rooms in his parents' home while she recovered from her injuries. There she'd stay until deemed strong enough to come back to Bluff House - or if his parents had their way, there she would stay, period. He wanted to think of her back here, in the house she loved, sitting out on the terrace with her evening martini, looking out at the ocean. Or puttering in her garden, maybe setting up her easel to paint. He wanted to think of her vital and tough, not helpless and broken on the floor while he'd been pouring a second cup — Nora Roberts

I mean, there's a little bit that gets out, but for the most part, the thing that makes us work, and makes our family successful, and our life successful, is when we walk home and we walk into our doors of our house, all that other stuff is left outside. It's not a factor. — Tim McGraw

A cozy home is not just a sixty-five thousand dollar house bought from Bank of America. A cozy home is a total consciousness of the two individuals within the framework of the home, and in relationship to the entire surrounding of this planet and beyond this planet. God lives in cozy homes. — Harbhajan Singh Yogi

The kitten was six weeks old. It was enchanting, a delicate fairy-tale cat, whose Siamese genes showed in the shape of the face, ears, tail, and the subtle lines of its body. [ ... ] She sat, a tiny thing, in the middle of a yellow carpet, surrounded by five worshipppers, not at all afraid of us. Then she stalked around that floor of the house, inspecting every inch of it, climbed up on to my bed, crept under the fold of a sheet, and was at home. — Doris Lessing

Are we running away from home?" I asked, giving voice to the question that had been on my mind for two days, ever since the lady at the Wok On restaurant asked where we were from and my mother lied.
My mother had laughed. I couldn't see her face, but her laugh I could always conjure - rich, ringing, like bells calling you to a wedding. "No, silly goose. You can't run away from home. It's not home if you want to run away from it." She paused to brush a strand of hair from my face. "You can only run away from a house. Home is something you run toward. — Michele Jaffe

I wonder if the real measure of "home" is the degree to which you can leave it alone. Maybe appreciating a house means knowing when to stop decorating. Maybe you've never really lived there until you've thrown its broken pieces in the garbage. Maybe learning how to be out in the big world isn't the epic journey everyone thinks it is. Maybe that's actually the easy part. The hard part is what's right in front of you. The hard part is learning how to hold the title to your very existence, to own not only property, but also your life. The hard part is learning not just how to be but mastering the nearly impossible art of how to be at home. — Meghan Daum

David found the heart to pray when he received God's Word of promise - that he would establish his throne and build him a house. Christians, however, have an infinitely greater Word of promise. God will not merely build us a house, he will make us his house. He will fill us with his presence, beauty, and glory. Every time Christians merely remember who they are in Christ, that great word comes home to us and we will find, over and over again, a heart to pray. — Timothy J. Keller

After my mother died, I had a feeling that was not unlike the homesickness that always filled me for the first few days when I went to stay at my grandparents' house, and even, I was stunned to discover, during the first few months of my freshman year at college. It was not really the home my mother had made that I yearned for. But I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life. — Anna Quindlen

But sleep didn't come. She could hear Jace's soft piano playing through the walls, but that wasn't what was keeping her awake. She was thinking of Simon, leaving for a house that no longer felt like home to him, of the despair in Jace's voice as he said 'I want to hate you', and of Magnus, not telling Jace the truth: that Alec did not want Jace to know about his relationship because he was still in love with him. She thought of the satisfaction it would have brought Magnus to say the words out loud, to acknowledge what the truth was, and the fact that he hadn't said them - had let Alec go on lying and pretending - because that was what Alec wanted, and Magnus cared about Alec enough to give him that. Maybe it was true what the Seelie Queen had said, after all: Love made you a liar. — Cassandra Clare

A month ago, Gavin had given his employer four weeks' notice. "I'll get a job around here," he'd told her. "Something low-stress, part-time, maybe. We're not paying rent, and Dad's left us plenty. You should quit, too." A year earlier this news would have filled her with delicious, full fat, chocolate-coated joy. But now, after a grueling routine of shitty work, shitty- weird home life in a house where the shadow of a dead boy walked more solidly than the grownups, shitty headaches, shitty worry about a husband who couldn't keep his dick out of other women, the golden offer just weirded Laine out. She didn't trust it. — Stephen M. Irwin

Ask yourself if you would feel comfortable giving your two best friends a key to your house. If not, look for some new best friends. — H. Jackson Brown Jr.

Listen Wanderlei, I will do a home invasion on you. I will cut the power to your house and the next thing you'll hear is me climbing up your stairs in a pair of night vision goggles I bought in the back of Soldier of Fortune magazine. I'll pick the lock to the master room door, take a picture of you in bed with the Nogueira brothers working on your 'jiu-jitsu'. I'll take said quote unquote photograph, post it at dorksfrombrazil, password - not required, username - not required. That, Wanderlei, is how you threaten someone. Dummy. — Chael Sonnen

Many have given up. They stay home and watch the TV screen, living on the earnings of their parents, cousins, bothers, or uncles, and only leave the house to go to the movies or to the nearest bar. "How're you making it?" on may ask, running into them along the block, or in the bar. "Oh, I'm TV-ing it"; with the saddest, sweetest, most shamefaced of smiles, and from a great distance. This distance one is compelled to respect; anyone who has traveled so far will not easily be dragged again into the world. There are further retreats, of course, than the TV screen or the bar. There are those who are simply sitting on their stoops, "stoned," animated for a moment only, and hideously, by the approach of someone who may lend them the money for a "fix." Or by the approach of someone from whom they can purchase it, one of the shrewd ones, on the way to prison or just coming out. — James Baldwin

I want you to know that I would be happy if the two of us spent the rest of our lives living in the cabin. It's not the size of the house that makes it a home. It's the love inside. Marrying you is the best decision I've ever made, Eric Hawke. — Pamela Clare

All of us remember the home of our childhood. Interestingly, our thoughts do not dwell on whether the house was large or small, the neighborhood fashionable or downtrodden. Rather, we delight in the experiences we shared as a family. The home is the laboratory of our lives, and what we learn there largely determines what we do when we leave there. — Thomas S. Monson

Occasionally, (Einstein) would take rambling walks on his own, which could be dicey. One day someone called the Institute and asked to speak to a particular dean. When his secretary said that the dean wasn't available, the caller hesitatingly asked for Einstein's home address. That was not possible to give out, he was informed. The caller's voice then dropped to a whisper. 'Please don't tell anybody,' he said, 'but I am Dr. Einstein, I'm on my way home, and I've forgotten where my house is. — Walter Isaacson

We have many examples of God walking with man. But this was intermittent and temporary compared to what it was prior to the Fall. Take for example, Enoch. The Bible says, "And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him" (Gen. 5:24). I can just imagine the fellowship those two had together. Then one day the walk took longer than usual and God looked at Enoch and said, "My house is closer. Why don't you come home with Me tonight?" And Enoch just disappeared. — A.W. Tozer

One day a few houses appeared," said Toshaway. "Someone had been cutting the trees. Of course we did not mind, in the same way you would not mind if someone came into your family home, disposed of your belongings, and moved in their own family. But perhaps, I don't know. Perhaps white people are different. Perhaps a Texan, if someone stole his house, he would say: 'Oh, I have made a mistake, I have built this house, but I guess you like it also so you may have it, along with all this good land that feeds my family. I am but a kahuu, little mouse. Please allow me to tell you where my ancestors lie, so you may dig them up and plunder their graves.' Do you think that is what he would say, Tiehteti-taibo?"
That was my name. I shook my head.
"That's right," said Toshaway. "He would kill the men who had stolen his house. He would tell them, 'Itsa nu kahni. Now I will cut out your heart. — Philipp Meyer

The official line is that, after the war, women couldn't wait to leave the offices and assembly lines and government agencies. But the real story was that the economy couldn't have men coming home without women going home, not unless it wanted a lot of unemployed vets. So the problem became unemployed women. "How you gonna keep us down on the farm after we've seen the world,"' she ad-libs to the old World War I tune. 'Enter the women's magazines, and cookbook publishers, and all these advertising agencies carrying on about the scourge of germs in the toilet bowl, and scuffs on the kitchen floor, and, my favorite, house B.O. Enter chicken hash that takes two and a half hours to prepare. I can just hear them sitting around the conference tables. 'That'll keep the gals out of trouble. — Ellen Feldman

Money will buy you a bed, but not a good night's sleep, a house but not a home, a companion but not a friend. — Zig Ziglar

I made the mistake of snooping and reading the model's journal. We finished having medium-to-boring sex and I rifled through his things while he took a shower. I am pretty good at snooping around. It started in my own house, where I would go through every drawer and every pocket in my parents' room. Luckily, I didn't find much at home except for some well-worn copies of Playboy that seem positively charming compared to the up-close butt fisting that pops up on my computer these days when I am trying to order salad tongs from Target. I honed my snooping skills when I babysat. It was then that I saw my first diaphragm, laxatives, and stacks of cash in an underwear drawer. I have basically ransacked every house I have been allowed into. My snooping tendencies have now abated somewhat, but I still have to fight the urge to immediately go through people's shit. I am not proud of this and I realize that by admitting this I am limiting future opportunities to be a houseguest. — Amy Poehler

Navigation, you see, is not just a problem for sailors. Everyone must go adventuring sooner or later, yet finding one's way home is not easy. Just like the North Star and all its whirling, starry brethren, a person's idea of where 'home' is remains in perpetual motion, one's whole life long.
Home was more than a house, even if the house was very grand. — Maryrose Wood

People are conditioned to believe that error is inevitable ... However, we do not accept the same standard when it comes to our personal life. If we did, we would resign ourselves to being shortchanged now and then when we cash our paychecks. We would expect hospital nurses to drop a certain percentage of all newborn babies. We would expect to go home to the wrong house periodically. As individuals we do not tolerate these things. Thus we have a double standard, one for ourselves, one for the company. — Phil Crosby

Oh! welcome to the wearied Earth
The Sabbath resting comes,
Gathering the sons of toil and care
Back to their peaceful homes;
And, like a portal to the skies,
Opens the House of God,
Where all who seek may come and learn
The way the Saviour trod.
But holier to the wanderer seems
The Sabbath on the deep,
When on, and on, in ceaseless course,
The toiling bark must keep,
And not a trace of man appears
Amid the wilderness
Of waters
then it comes like dove
Direct from heaven to bless. — Sarah Josepha Hale

It's not a house, it's a home. — Bob Dylan

I do not understand when a person is more concerned with the appearance of their house than the state of their home. — Gillian Duce

Or perhaps you notice a congregation of ladybugs on a rose stalk. Don't invoke the old nursery saying and ask them to fly away home. Their house is not on fire. Your roses are, with aphids, which the ladybugs are feeding on - and you can bless yourself that they have come to your rescue. — Eleanor Perenyi

The Bishop, who was sitting close to him, gently touched his hand. "You could not help telling me who you were. This is not my house; it is the house of Jesus Christ. This door does not demand of him who enters whether he has a name, but whether he has a grief. You suffer, you are hungry and thirsty; you are welcome. And do not thank me; do not say that I receive you in my house. No one is at home here, except the man who needs a refuge. I say to you, who are passing by, that you are much more at home here than I am myself. Everything here is yours. What need have I to know your name? Besides, before you told me you had one which I knew."
The man opened his eyes in astonishment.
"Really? You knew what I was called?"
"Yes," replied the Bishop, "you are called my brother. — Victor Hugo

A man leaves his great house because he's bored
With life at home, and suddenly returns,
Finding himself no happier abroad.
He rushes off to his villa driving like mad,
You'ld think he's going to a house on fire,
And yawns before he's put his foot inside,
Or falls asleep and seeks oblivion,
Or even rushes back to town again.
So each man flies from himself (vain hope, because
It clings to him the more closely against his will)
And hates himself because he is sick in mind
And does not know the cause of his disease. — Titus Lucretius Carus

On a frosty winter afternoon, I rode in sight of Thornfield Hall. On a stile in Hay Lane I saw a quiet little figure sitting by itself. I had no presentiment of what it would be to me; no inward warning that the arbitress of my life
my genius for good or evil
waited there in humble guise.
When once I had pressed the frail shoulder, something new
a fresh sap and sense
stole into my frame. It was well I had learnt that this elf must return to me
that it belonged to my house down below- -or I could not have felt it pass away from under my hand, and seen it vanish behind the dim hedge, without singular regret. I heard you come home that night, Jane, though probably you were not aware that I thought of you or watched for you. — Charlotte Bronte

Dear God, May this house be a sacred dwelling for those who live here. May those who visit feel the peace we have received from You. May darkness not enter. May the light of God shield this house from harm. May the angels bring their peace here and use our home as a haven of light. May all grow strong in this place of healing, our sanctuary from the loudness of the world. May it so be used by You forever. — Marianne Williamson

I say no wealth is worth my life! Not all they claim
was stored in the depths of Troy, that city built on riches,
in the old days of peace before the sons of Achaea came-
not all the gold held fast in the Archer's rocky vaults,
in Phoebus Apollo's house on Pytho's sheer cliffs!
Cattle and fat sheep can all be had for the raiding,
tripods all for the trading, and tawny-headed stallions.
But a man's life breath cannot come back again-
no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,
once it slips through a man's clenched teeth.
Mother tells me,
the immortal goddess Thetis with her glistening feet,
that two fates bear me on to the day of death.
If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy,
my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies.
If I voyage back to the fatherland I love,
my pride, my glory dies ...
true, but the life that's left me will be long,
the stroke of death will not come on me quickly. — Homer

If your child can't resist throwing gravel in the park, in spite of your efforts to offer tempting alternatives, you can say, "I'm taking you home now. I don't want anyone to get hit by a rock, even a little one."

If your child wants to help put pancake batter in the pan, but despite friendly reminders you can't convince him not to jump around at the stove, you can say, "I can't cook with you now. I'm too worried about burns."

If your child refuses to get in his carseat, "I can see the seat belt is uncomfortable. You feel freer without it. I can't take you to your friend's house without the belt buckled." Or, "I don't want to be late for work. I'm buckling you in. I know how much you hate it! — Joanna Faber

We're not going to make it, I said.
The words caught in my throat, choking me. What was it Leslie had said to me when we were discussing Shannon's and Antoinetta's disappearance? 'You're beginning to sound like one of the characters in your books, Adam.' She'd been right. If this were a novel my heroes would have arrived just in the nick of time and saved the day. But real life didn't work like that. Real life had no happy endings. Despite our best efforts, despite my love for Tara [his wife] and my determination to protect her, and after everything we'd been through at the LeHorn house, fate conspired against us. We were still nine or ten miles from home, and night was almost upon us. By the time we got there it would already be too late. I fought back tears. I had the urge just to lie down in the middle of the road and let the next car run over me. — Brian Keene

Much they saw, and far they went, and many homes they visited, but always with a happy end. The Spirit stood beside sick beds, and they were cheerful; on foreign lands, and they were close at home; by struggling men, and they were patient in their greater hope; by poverty, and it was rich. In alms-house, hospital, and jail, in misery's every refuge, where vain man in his little brief authority had not made fast the door, and barred the Spirit out, he left his blessing, and taught Scrooge his prospects. — Charles Dickens

Honestly, you would have thought she'd be happy to have me, her premenstrual-screaming-raging-teenage-daughter-who-is-lovely-to-everyone-else-but-the-actual-devil-at-home, out of the house for a little bit. But it appeared not having me at home caused her just as much stress as having me there did. — Giovanna Fletcher

A seven year old to a neighbor after the boy's house burned down, "Oh, that was not our home. That was our house. We still have our home. We just don't have a place to put it right now." — Gene R. Cook

In life, a person will come and go from many homes. We may leave a house, a town, a room, but that does not mean those places leave us. Once entered, we never entirely depart the homes we make for ourselves in the world. They follow us, like shadows, until we come upon them again, waiting for us in the mist. — Ari Berk

Everyone needs a home, and you're mine. It's not this house. It's not a building. It's wherever you are. That's my home. — Nina Levine

Every telecomm company is as big a corporate welfare bum as you could ask for. Try to imagine what it would cost at market rates to go around to every house in every town in every country and pay for the right to block traffic and dig up roads and erect poles and string wires and pierce every home with cabling. The regulatory fiat that allows these companies to get their networks up and running is worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars.
If phone companies want to operate in the "free market," then let them: the FCC could give them 60 days to get all their rotten copper out of our dirt, or we'll buy it from them at the going scrappage rates. Then, let's hold an auction for the right to be the next big telecomm company, on one condition: in exchange for using the public's rights-of-way, you have to agree to connect us to the people we want to talk to, and vice-versa, as quickly and efficiently as you can. — Cory Doctorow

One thing we've learned this summer is that a house is not an end in itself, any more than "home" is just one geographic location where things feel safe and familiar. Home can be anyplace in which we create our own sense of rest and peace as we tend to the spaces in which we eat and sleep and play. It is a place that we create and re-create in every moment, at every stage of our lives, a place where the plain and common becomes cherished and the ordinary becomes sacred. — Katrina Kenison

When he first met Kai, Sehun already knew that he was about to lose entire world. Although at the time, he thought that Kai would try to destroy his world. How can you hang on to something so incomprehensible? How can you keep pouring love into an abyss? An abyss. That was what Kai was. This town was not his home. This house was not his home. Kai was. Being in his arms, having him inflict a sort of beautiful pain was home. Sehun fell for Kai and he fell for Sehun just as hard. — Hyperionova

Not far away lay the big cannons that had held Ulysses Grant at bay for fifty siege days while the citizens of the town ate rat flesh and clung to their long-cherished beliefs. How many had died in that lost cause? Dr. Tarver wondered. Fifty thousand casualties at Gettysburg alone, and for what? To free the slaves who built this house? To preserve the Union? Had Stonewall Jackson died to create a nation of couch potatoes ignorant of their own history and incapable of simple mathematics? If those brave soldiers in blue and gray had seen what lay in the future, they would have laid down their muskets and walked home to their farms. — Greg Iles

Everly sighs and crosses her arms across her chest. "No, I didn't catch anything at the wedding except Finn's house key."

"Professor Camden gave you his house key? I though you said he was going to require additional convincing before, and I quote, he accepted what was best for him?"

She waves a dismissive hand. "No, I made myself a copy."

"Everly, no." I am shaking my head at her in disbelief. "No, you did not. How? Does he know?"

"Sophie, it's like you don't even know me. I borrowed his car." She stops at the look on my face. "Fine, I stole his car and ran over to Home Depot and made copies while he was busy with his best man duties. — Jana Aston

But the windows of the house of Memory, and the windows of the house of Mercy, are not so easily closed as windows of glass and wood. They fly open unexpectedly; they rattle in the night; they must be nailed up. Mr. The Englishman had tried nailing them, but had not driven the nails quite home. So he passed but a disturbed evening and a worse night. — Charles Dickens

Swirling furiously among the stairs and corridors of her exquisite home like a small and angry white bat Sybilla, Dowager Lady Culter, was not above spitting at her unfortunate son when he chose to sit down in his own great hall to take his boots off. 'If Madge Mumblecrust comes down those stairs once again for a morsel of fowl's liver with ginger, or pressed meats with almond-milk, I shall retire to a little wicker house in the forest and cast spells which will sink Venice into the sea for ever, and Madame Donati with it. The Church,' said Sybilla definitely, 'should excommunicate girls who do not replace lids on sticky jars and wash their hair every day with the best towels. — Dorothy Dunnett

The best thing for me is, when I'm not working, is to be at home and to have a script or two scripts is better, and to be just walking around the house and just thinking about the lines. — Christopher Walken

Balance is everything. And I'm not just speaking from a road perspective - even from home. My wife and I work out of the house and we always struggle to find that balance because when work is around you 24/7, it's easy to neglect the little things in life that really help us to rejuvenate or heal. — Chuck Ragan

Miss Finch, it's not wise for officers to quarter in the same house with an unmarried gentlewoman. Have a care for your reputation, if your father does not."
"Have a care for my reputation?" She had to laugh. Then she lowered her voice. "This, from the man who flattened me in the road and kissed me without leave?"
"Precisely." His eyes darkened.
His meaning washed over her in a wave of hot, sensual awareness. Surely he wasn't implying ...
No. He wasn't implying at all. Those hard jade eyes were giving her a straightforward message, and he underscored it with a slight flex of his massive arms: I am every bit as dangerous as you suppose. If not more so.
"Take your kind invitation and run home with it. When soldiers and maids live under the same roof, things happen. And if you happened to find yourself under me again ... " His hungry gaze raked her body. "You wouldn't escape so easily."
She gasped. "You are a beast."
"Just a man, Miss Finch. Just a man. — Tessa Dare

Yes. What is it, guilt, revenge, love, what?"
I swallowed. "I live alone."
"And your point is?"
"You have the Pack. You're surrounded by people who would fall over themselves for the pleasure of your company. I have no one. My parents are dead, my entire family is gone. I have no friends. Except Jim, and that's more of a working relationship than anything else. I have no lover. I can't even have a pet, because I'm not at the house often enough to keep it from starving. When I come crawling home, bleeding and filthy and exhausted, the house is dark and empty. Nobody keeps the porch light on for me. Nobody hugs me and says, 'Hey, I'm glad you made it. I'm glad you're okay. I was worried.' Nobody cares if I live or die. Nobody makes me coffee, nobody holds me before I go to bed, nobody fixes my medicine when I'm sick. I'm by myself. — Ilona Andrews

Aubade with a Broken Neck The first night you don't come home summer rains shake the clematis. I bury the dead moth I found in our bed, scratch up a rutabaga and eat it rough with dirt. The dog finds me and presents between his gentle teeth a twitching nightjar. In her panic, she sings in his mouth. He gives me her pain like a gift, and I take it. I hear the cries of her young, greedy with need, expecting her return, but I don't let her go until I get into the house. I read the auspices - the way she flutters against the wallpaper's moldy roses means all can be lost. How she skims the ceiling means a storm approaches. You should see her in the beginnings of her fear, rushing at the starless window, her body a dart, her body the arrow of longing, aimed, as all desperate things are, to crash not into the object of desire, but into the darkness behind it. — Traci Brimhall

Kellum reminded the jury that special prosecutor Robert Smith, "a gentleman I don't know," would have the final argument, and that this was a powerful advantage. He then closed with a dramatic message that the jury's verdict would have eternal consequences. I want you to think of the future. When your summons comes to cross the Great Divide, and, as you enter your father's house - a home not made by hands but eternal in the heavens, you can look back to where your father's feet have trod and see your good record written in the sands of time and, when you go down to your lonely silent tomb to a sleep that knows no dreams, I want you to hold in the palm of your hand a record of service to God and your fellow man. And the only way you can do that is to turn these boys loose.123 — Devery S. Anderson

He married and made a home. He went endlessly from house to house and spoke the mission and the truth. The hopeless suffering of his people made in him a madness, a wild and evil feeling of destruction. At times he drank strong liquor and beat his head against the floor. In his heart there was a savage violence, and once he grasped the poker from the hearth and struck down his wife. She took Hamilton, Karl Marx, William, and Portia with her to her father's home. He wrestled in his spirit and fought down the evil blackness. But Daisy did not come back. And eight years later when she died his sons were not children anymore and they did not return to him. He was left an old man in an empty house. — Carson McCullers

The house, and all the objects in it, crackled with static electricity; undertows washed through it, the air was heavy with things that were known but not spoken. Like a hollow log, a drum, a church, it was amplified, so that conversations whispered in it sixty years ago can be half-heard today. — Margaret Atwood

One year, on Yom Kippur eve, Salanter did not show up in synagogue for services. The congregation was extremely worried; they could only imagine that their rabbi had suddenly taken sick or been in an accident. In any case, they would not start the service without him. During the wait, a young woman in the congregation became agitated. She had left her infant child at home asleep in its crib; she was certain she would only be away a short while. Now, because of the delay, she slipped out to make sure that the infant was all right. When she reached her house, she found her child being rocked in the arms of Rabbi Salanter. He had heard the baby crying while walking to the synagogue and, realizing that the mother must have gone off to services, had gone into the house to calm him. — Joseph Telushkin

Amid this social intercourse, however, he avoided sedulously a meeting with Mrs. Annice; he had decided not to see her for a while. Indeed, it was not till an evening late in February, after dinner, that he took a cab to her house near Washington Square. He found her at home, and had not waited a minute before she came into the room. She was a tall woman, and wonderfully handsome by gaslight; but she had that tiresome habit, which many women have, of talking intensely
in italics, as it were: a habit found generally in women ill brought up-women without control of their feelings, or command of the expression of them.
("The Bargain of Rupert Orange") — Vincent O'Sullivan

This is not my house; it is the house of Jesus Christ. This door does not demand of him who enters whether he has a name, but whether he has a grief. You suffer, you are hungry and thirsty; you are welcome. And do not thank me; do not say that I receive you in my house. No one is at home here, except the man who needs a refuge. I say to you, who are passing by, that you are much more at home here than I am myself. — Victor Hugo

And suddenly it seemed to Olive that every house she had ever gone into depressed her, except for her own, and the one they had built for Christopher. It was as though she had never outgrown that feeling she must have had as a child - that hypersensitivity to the foreign smell of someone else's home, the fear that coated the unfamiliar way a bathroom door closed, the creak in a staircase worn by footsteps not one's own. — Elizabeth Strout

Let's be Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus's children, Scout and Jem, carefully watch their father's behavior as the house next door to theirs burns to the ground. As the fire creeps closer and closer to the Finches' home, Atticus appears so calm that Scout and Jem finally decide that "it ain't time to worry yet." We need to be Atticus. Hands in our pockets. Calm. Believing. So that our children will look at us and even with a fire raging in front of them, they'll say, "Huh. Guess it's not time to worry yet. — Glennon Doyle Melton

But even if they could go home it would be difficult for me to tell you what the moral of the story is. In some stories, it's easy. The moral of "The Three Bears," for instance, is "Never break into someone else's house." The moral of "Snow White" is "Never eat apples." The moral of World War One is "Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand." [ ... ] and as the Baudelaire orphans sat and watched the dock fill with people as the business of the day began, they figured out something that was very important to them. It dawned on them that unlike Aunt Josephine, who had lived up in that house, sad and alone, the three children had one another for comfort and support over the course of their miserable lives. And while this did not make them feel entirely safe, or entirely happy, it made them feel appreciative. — Lemony Snicket

Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house. This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms. — Gaston Bachelard

I'm not saying that owning a house makes life into some kind of blissful paradise; simply that it makes the difference between freedom and enslavement. — Tana French

I cannot but regard it as a kindness in those who have the steering of me that, by the want of pecuniary wealth, I have been nailed dawn to this my native region so long and steadily, and made to study and love this spot of earth more and more. What would signify in comparison a thin and diffused love and knowledge of the whole earth instead, got by wandering? The traveler's is but a barren and comfortless condition. Wealth will not buy a man a home in nature-house nor farm there. The man of business does not by his business earn a residence in nature, but is denaturalized rather. — Henry David Thoreau

But even in September, Thursday was a big money night, seven to eight hundred take-home, and that's what April concentrated on as she drove, Franny's chin starting to loll against her chest - April made herself think of that fat roll of tens and twenties she'd have at closing, how she'd fold it into the front pocket of her jeans then go to the house mom's office off the dressing room and give Tina a hundred before she found Franny in her pj's on Tina's brown vinyl couch, and she'd try not to think of the walls above Tina's desk covered with dancers' schedules and audition Polaroids of naked women, some of them under postcards from girls who came and went. — Andre Dubus III

If the members of a home are ill-temperered and quarrelsome, how quickly you feel it when you enter the house. You may not know just what is wrong, but you wish to make your visit short. — Laura Ingalls Wilder

Death is not a journey into an unknown land; it is a voyage home. We are going, not to a strange country, but to our fathers house. — John Ruskin

I bet you to believe me when I say again that we do not need a great house, Sarah. We only need a great love. — Stephanie Grace Whitson

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body. — Benjamin Franklin

Are wild strawberries really wild? Will they scratch an adult, will they snap at a child? Should you pet them, or let them run free where they roam? Could they ever relax in a steam-heated home? Can they be trained to not growl at the guests? Will a litterbox work or would they make a mess? Can we make them a Cowberry, herding the cows, or maybe a Muleberry pulling the plows, or maybe a Huntberry chasing the grouse, or maybe a Watchberry guarding the house, and though they may curl up at your feet oh so sweetly can you ever feel that you trust them completely? Or should we make a pet out of something less scary, like the Domestic Prune or the Imported Cherry, Anyhow, you've been warned and I will not be blamed if your Wild Strawberries cannot be tamed. — Shel Silverstein

It became obvious why Catholics had built such beautiful cathedrals and churches throughout the world. Not as gathering or meeting places for Christians. But as a home for Jesus Himself in the Blessed Sacrament. Cathedrals house Jesus. Christians merely come and visit Him. The cathedrals and churches architecturally prepare our souls for the beauty of the Eucharist. — Allen R. Hunt

Americans who have parents raised during the Great Depression or World War II understand how drastically things have changed on the home front. My father did not care a whit whether I liked him, and it would have been unthinkable for him to pick up my stuff. There were rules in the house, and they were enforced. — Bill O'Reilly

Bring a wife home to your house when you are of the right age, not far short of 30 years, nor much above; this is the right time for marriage. — Hesiod

When I bought my first house in London with my husband-to-be, our surveyor said: "Nicki, you're paying top dollar, but it's not an investment," and I said: "But we're buying a home, not an investment." — Nicki Chapman

What shop did this book come from? she asked. Her father was looking worried at the cooker. He always got rice wrong. I don't know, Brooksie, he said, I don't remember. That was unimaginable, not remembering where a book has come from! and where it was bought from! That was part of the whole history, the whole point, of any book that you owned! And when you picked it up later in the house at home, you knew, you just knew by looking and having it in your hand, where it came from and where you got it and when and why you'd decided to buy it. — Ali Smith

I had grown up in a house with a fence around it, and in this fence was a white smooth wooden gate, two holes bored round and low together so the dog could see through. One night, the moon high, late for me home from the school dance, I remember that I stopped, hand on the gate, and spoke so quietly to myself and to the woman that I would love that not even the dog could have heard.
I don't know where you are, but you're living right now, somewhere on this earth. And one day you and I are going to touch this gate where I'm touching it now. Your hand will touch this very wood, here! Then we'll walk through and we'll be full of a future and of a past and we'll be to each other like no one else has ever been. We can't meet now, I don't know why. But some day our questions will be answers and we'll be caught in something so bright ... and every step I take is one step closer on a bridge we must cross to meet. — Richard Bach

All the children in the world, when they go to school, have the right to study in their mother tongue. But we go to school and run into literary Arabic as children. It sounds like a foreign language. The words for "house" or "table" or "lamp" are not the same as the words we use at home, and most of the other words are alien to children at school. Classical Arabic is one of the prisons of the Arab world. — Hassan Blasim

It was not necessary to leave to learn that. But there were other reasons to go. If a person had a child but no husband, a room but no house, a place but no home, a will but no way, and if a person was losing her son and herself, little by little, day by day, because she knew what she knew in her skin and bones but not what her sister-in-law knew in her books and pamphlets, then yes, it was necessary. — Jamie Zeppa

Happiness doesn't lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home. And home is not a house-home is a mythological conceit. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace. — Dennis Lehane

Please do not go to Kmart and buy twenty pairs of jeans because each costs five dollars. The jeans are not running away. They will be there tomorrow at an even more reduced price. You are now in America: do not expect to have hot food for lunch. That African taste must be abolished. When you visit the home of an American with some money, they will offer to show you their house. Forget that in your house back home, your father would throw a fit if anyone came close to his bedroom. We all know that the living room was where it stopped and, if absolutely necessary, then the toilet. But please smile and follow the American and see the house and make sure you say you like everything. And do not be shocked by the indiscriminate touching of American couples. Standing in line at the cafeteria, the girl will touch the boy's arm and the boy will put his arm around her shoulder and they will rub shoulders and back and rub rub rub, but please do not imitate this behavior. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

He let himself into the house and sat down with his back against the door, where the tiles were cool on his legs and he tried to hear, as he had earlier imagined, every single thing that his wife was not doing in their home on this Sunday night. He could hardly keep track of it all, she was so busy being absent. She was not pouring water into a glass or a pitcher. She was not kicking his shoes out of the hall. She was not switching the laundry into the dryer. She was not opening the screen door and going outside barefoot and calling for him to come look at the sunset. She was not putting lotion on her elbows or flattening the newspaper or picking up the ringing telephone, which would go on calling out the absence of Petra in nine-ring sequences dozens of times every day. — Ramona Ausubel

A house is not a home without a cat. — Beth Campbell

When I have children that go home and mom and dad are not home because they're working, they're trying to get food on the table, and they come home to an empty house and they go to sleep in an empty house, there is no way that child can compete against a child from the west side of Los Angeles who both parents went to Stanford. Well, good for them, God love them. That's not an equal playing field. — Rafe Esquith

A house is not a home. — Polly Adler

The tenement house is the enemy of modesty, the enemy of virtue, the enemy of patriotism. Home is where the virtues grow. I would like to see the law so that every home, to a small amount, should be free not only from sale for debts, but should be absolutely free from taxation, so that every man could have a home. Then we will have a nation of patriots. — Robert G. Ingersoll

No." Laurence said, "I mean to retire when we have returned. I have enough money to keep Temeraire now, and enough of a countenance to ask my brother to put us up on one of the farms."

Or they might return to Australia, or to China. Temeraire has every right to ask that of him now that the war was won. Laurence did not mean to refuse him, he only hoped to go back to Wollaton Hall first and find a way to carry it with him somehow. He longed in a deep inward part for Britain, for home, and the house standing at twilight with all the windows lit. A child's memory of peace. He would even be grateful there for the counterfeit honors that had been heaped onto his head, if they gave his mother some peace, and his brother need not be ashamed to give him a field for Temeraire to sleep in, for a little while. — Naomi Novik

And for the first time since coming home, i'm completely happy. It's strange. Home ... to be here, in my technical house, and discover now someplace different ... Is it possible for home to be a person and not a place? ... For the two of us, home isn't a place. It's a person. And we're finally home. — Stephanie Perkins

So you've been capturing mice and releasing them here?"
"Yes, anything wrong with that?"
"The thing is, if they're house mice, they'll just go on back home. You've probably been catching the same ones each day."
She considered for a moment and he tried very hard not to laugh. "I doubt it. The place is overrun with them. It's really not up to standard. I suspect the landlord's name is Rackman. — Susan Leona Fisher

No matter how far they traveled, they always had this house to welcome them home." "True. Did you ever wonder why they altered it so often?" "Miss Everleigh says they were innovators. Visionaries." He glanced at her, the firelight shadowing his face. "They kept knocking down the walls. Expanding them, making new routes for egress. Not much innovation in that. As visions go, it's the dream of claustrophobics." The notion unsettled her. "What do you mean to say?" "I mean, they traveled to escape this place." He reached for the bottle, splashed more liquor into his glass. Set down the bottle and stared at it. "Came back very reluctantly, already itching to leave again." She did not like that idea. "It was their home. They were a famously loving family - " "It's a house," he said. "That doesn't make it a home. And family - yes, family is important. But it can trap you more neatly than four walls and a locked door." Her — Meredith Duran

I don't know what justice is," she said.
"That's because it isn't the sort of thing you discover. It's a thing you make." She looked at him, and he shrugged. "There are things you find out in the world. Rocks and streams and trees. And there are things you make. Like a house, or a song. It's not that houses and songs aren't real, but you don't just find them in a field someplace and haul them back home with you. They have to be worked at. Made. — Daniel Abraham

Money can buy a house, but not a home; a bed, but not rest; food, but not an appetite; medicine, but not health; information, but not wisdom; thrills, but not joy; associates, but not friends; servants, but not loyalty; flattery, but not respect. — Pat Williams

People that went to art house theatre have more options, I used to go, but now think any movie can be delivered in a red envelope three months after it's released so why not watch it on my flat screen in the comfort of home. — Edward Burns

Don't worry that you're being pathetic when you try not to get caught stealing a kiss from your spouse, or when you pray for a time when the kids are out of the house so you can make out on the couch, or when you consider a trip with your husband to the lawn-care section of Home Depot a hot date.

No. You're not pathetic. You're in a blended family.... — Kathi Lipp

No prophet or apostle has lived a celibate life is what I'd like to tell her. No one who's ever told me celibacy is a viable option has ever been celibate. They don't even use the word. They say 'abstinent,' which implies there will be an end. They don't consider what my life will be like, if I never marry. Which is likely, given who I am, and the ways I'm different. People stand at the pulpit, or they come to my house, and tell me not to need what every human needs. Afterward, they go home and undress. They lie down next to the person they love most, or once did. — Nicole Hardy

A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as for the body. For human beings are not so constituted that they can live without expansion. If they do not get it in one way, they must in another, or perish. — Margaret Fuller

A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless. — May Sarton

Do I know that? How the hell can I possibly know that? Only a few hours earlier, Chris, my beloved husband of twenty years, jumped to his death off the roof of a parking garage a mile from our home. Cops came to the house in a pair to tell me, just like in the movies. Ding-dong, your husband's dead. Your life is over. Except it's not. — Amy Biancolli

Sometimes there is no choice but to walk into your own house. Far away, you think, and you do not want to see. You come home and you say do not tell me. You say, I have hunted the elk all over the snowfields of the Selway, and I do not want to know what happened here. And then there is a morning you walk in and take a look in your own house, like any traveler. — William Kittredge

When I spoke to a colleague about Joe's report, her face registered surprise. She said, "Is it possible for a death in a nursing home to be premature?"
Joe told me, "If it were happening in any other kind of institution, to any other part of the population - workers, say, or children - there'd be an outcry, media, inquiries, swift intervention. The truth is we do not value the last months or years of a person's life. The remaining life of someone old. Particularly if they are in residential care."
If we are all just economic units who lift or lean, then very little is "lost" when a nursing home resident or anyone getting on in their years dies prematurely. In fact money might be saved - one less nursing-home bed to fund, and the kids can finally get their hands on the house. — Karen Hitchcock