Life On Wallpaper Quotes & Sayings

Was it worth while to lay
with infinite exertion
a roof I can't live under?
- All those blueprints,
closings of gaps,
measurings, calculations?
A life I didn't choose
chose me: even
my tools are the wrong ones
for what I have to do.
I'm naked, ignorant,
a naked man fleeing
across the roofs
who could with a shade of difference
be sitting in the lamplight
against the cream wallpaper
reading - not with indifference
about a naked man
fleeing across the roofs. — Adrienne Rich

The guilt of moving on seeps into my life every time I do something I thought I couldn't do without you. Every time I make a financial decision, I take over your job. Every time I fix the washing machine, choose a wallpaper without consulting you, I feel guilty. How dare I function without you! What could you have possibly meant to me if I can function without you? Much less, function well. Every so often I'm overwhelmed with the decisions. In those moments I hate you for leaving me. But I am stronger now, and I like being strong. And for this, I feel guilty. When can I stop proving that I loved you? When will I stop believing that loving you better might have saved you? — Stephanie Ericsson

The wallpaper with which the men of science have covered the world of reality is falling to tatters. The grand whorehouse which they have made of life requires no decoration; it is essential that only the drains function adequately. Beauty, that feline beauty that has us by the balls in America, is finished. — Henry Miller

[we] read in the bystander's eyes the success or failure of our own conduct. — William James

I rode up, walked past a few miles of wallpaper that was someone's revenge for life's disappointments. — Keith Laumer

OLD MARX He can't think. London is damp, in every room someone coughs. He never did like winter. He rewrites past manuscripts time and again, without passion. The yellow paper is fragile as consumption. Why does life race stubbornly toward destruction? But spring returns in dreams, with snow that doesn't speak in any known tongue. And where does love fit within his system? Where you find blue flowers. He despises anarchists, idealists bore him. He receives reports from Russia, far too detailed. The French grow rich. Poland is common and quiet. America never stops growing. Blood is everywhere, perhaps the wallpaper needs changing. He begins to suspect that poor humankind will always trudge across the old earth like the local lunatic shaking her fists at an unseen God. — Adam Zagajewski

There's a terrible stillness. I notice a small tear in the wallpaper above her shoulder. I notice finger marks grimed on the light switch. Somewhere down in the house, a door opens and shuts. As Zoey turns to face me, I realize that life is made up of a series of moments, each one a journey to the end. — Jenny Downham

To have been part of a Pharaonic slave system that had at its apex a divine sun king led him to understand unreality as the greatest force in life. And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not matter - professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size of an office or the matter of a dedicated car parking space - was vested with the greatest significance, and everything that did matter - pleasure, joy, friendship, love - was deemed somehow peripheral. It made for dullness mostly and weirdness generally. — Richard Flanagan

If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophany of spoinks. — Steven Pinker

It isn't chic for women to be drunk. Men drunks are more excusable, more easily absolved, but why? It must be thought they have better reasons. — Margaret Atwood

Happiness does not depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude — Dale Carnegie

Turned away from the sooty sill and the dark city-
turned away forever
from the factories, the personal strivings,
to a life of the imagination. — Mary Oliver

Wallpaper. Decoration. Her whole life and person, whittled down to nothing. "I don't accept that ," Etta said. I'm neither of those things. And, for the record, neither are you. — Alexandra Bracken

As long as imperialism exists it will, by definition, exert its domination over other countries. Today that domination is called neocolonialism. — Che Guevara

Fear and pain and suffering is not OK for any being to feel intentionally at the hands of us. — Leona Lewis

I understood that people are trying to transform themselves all the time: the universal urge to be otherwise. So as not to look as they look, sound as they sound, be treated as they are treated, suffer in the ways they suffer, etc., etc., they change hairdos, tailors, spouses, accents, friends, they change their addresses, their noses, their wallpaper, even their forms of government, all to be more like themselves or less like themselves, or more like or less like that exemplary prototype whose image is theirs to emulate or to repudiate obsessively for life. — Philip Roth

Chloe. Always Chloe with him and his brother. I know I sound like a whiny brat when I complain, but I think I have a good reason. I'd just discovered that I was a witch and my mother was a bitch - the murderous kind. I was now on the run with three kids who didn't want me along.
No matter how hard I tried to keep up and help out, the guys only cared about Chloe. If I ran in front of this bus to push her to safety, they'd race to her side to see if she was okay. Probably give me crap for bruising her when I shoved her out of the way. — Kelley Armstrong

I felt that the IRA, in the context of Irish history, and Sinn Fein were a legitimate force that had to be recognized, and you wouldn't have peace without them. — Peter T. King

I suppose at heart it was the haircut that did it; that exploded the ordinary order of things and showed me the possibilities that had been there all along, hidden among the patterns in the wallpaper. In a different age, we used to take acid for more or less the same reason. — Michael Cunningham

And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not matter - professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size of an office or the matter of a dedicated car parking space - was treated with the greatest significance, and everything that did matter - pleasure, joy, friendship, loved - was deemed somehow peripheral. — Richard Flanagan

If you're going to write about someone's life, you don't just use them for wallpaper. You have to honor and respect that life. — Nick Flynn

I walk across the park to her flat. It is over-heated and there is a great deal of pink. This used not to unnerve me. Now when I step into the bathroom I recoil.
Pink bath, pink basin, pink toilet, pink bidet, pink tiles, pink wallpaper, pink rug. Brushes, soap, tooth brush, silk flowers, toilet paper: all pink. Even the little foot-operated waste-bin is pale pink. I know this little waste-bin well. Every time I sleep here I wonder what I am doing with my time and hers. She is sixteen years younger than I am. She is not the woman with whom I want to share my life. But, having begun, what we have continues. She wants it to, and I go along with it, through lust and loneliness, I suppose; and laziness, and lack of focus. — Vikram Seth

Look, let me give you the CliffsNotes: You're a bitch in this life and Daniel doesn't care. Shocker! He courts you for a few weeks, there's some exchanging of flowers. A big kiss and then kaboom. Okay? Not much more to see.

You don't understand.

What? I don't understand that Victorians are as stuffy as an attic and as boring as watching wallpaper peel? Come on, if you're going to zigzag through your past, make it count. Let's hit some highlights.

Luce didn't budge. Is there a way to make you disappear?

Do I have to stuff you in this Announcer like a cat in a suitcase? Let's move! — Lauren Kate

One's home is like a delicious piece of pie you order in a restaurant on a country road one cozy evening - the best piece of pie you have ever eaten in your life - and can never find again. After you leave home, you may find yourself feeling homesick, even if you have a new home that has nicer wallpaper and a more efficient dishwasher than the home in which you grew up. — Daniel Handler

I definitely start early and keep items in mind throughout the year for key people in my life. I love wrapping everyone's gifts in hand-painted wallpaper sheets, which gives the gift extra love. — Kelly Wearstler

Then he was gone, and Prentice was alone in a silence that rang with all his shrill, unspoken words. He was so alone that the only thing to do was lie back on the bed and roll over and draw up his knees like an unborn baby, staring with dry eyes at a cluster of pink flowers on the wallpaper, knowing he had never been so alone in his life. — Richard Yates

She became vulnerable before me, opening herself and letting me own her until I lost myself and became a beast. Without her armor, she was more beautiful than I'd imagined possible. — C.D. Reiss

India, she now knew, would not be content staying in the background, was nobody's wallpaper, insisted in interjecting itself into everyone's life, meddling with it, twisting it, molding it beyond recognition. India, she had found out, was a place of political intrigue and economic corruption, a place occupied by real people with their incessantly human needs, desires, ambitions, and aspirations, and not the exotic, spiritual, mysterious entity that was a creation of the Western imagination. — Thrity Umrigar