Neat Room Quotes & Sayings

Quentin looked curiously around. "This is a neat room," he said.

"Yes, it is," I replied, directing my compliment toward the distant ceiling. Everyone deserves a few compliments. Even a building. — Seanan McGuire

Dolor
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplicaton of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate gray standard faces. — Theodore Roethke

Creativity needs a bit of untidiness. Make everything too neat and there is no room for experiment. — Charles Handy

She rose and washed and dressed herself and braided her hair freshly, and having made her room neat for the day she went into the peach-tree garden. It lay in the silence of the spring morning. Under the early sun the dew still hung in a bright mist on the grass, and the pool in the center of the garden was brimming its stone walls. The water was clear and the fish were flashing their golden sides near the surface. The great low-built house that surrounded the garden was still in sleep. Birds twittered in the eaves undisturbed and a small Pekingese dog slept on the threshold like a small lioness. — Pearl S. Buck

The room was so neat and tidy it made me feel quite depressed ... I do not allow myself to repine about what cannot be helped; but I remembered earlier Decembers, under the cloudless blue skies and brilliant sun of Egypt.
As I stood morosely contemplating the destruction of our cheerful domestic clutter, and recalling better days, I heard the sound of wheels on the gravel of the drive. The first guest had arrived. Gathering the robes of my martyrdom about me, I made ready to receive her. — Elizabeth Peters

Worse than that, however, was the CFO, a dapper-suited, neat-haired new age carapace containing an uninhibited misogynistic bogan, whose actual words to me, in concert with my boss in the same room were: 'To be successful you have to accept that weekends are for families. — Annabel Crabb

And then I'm me again, staring into Dr. Russell's room feeling dizzy and looking straight at Dr. Russell's face and also the back of his head and thinking to myself, Damn, that's a neat trick, and it seems like I just had that thought in stereo. And it hits me. I'm in two places at the same time. I smile and see the old me and the new me smile simultaneously. "I'm breaking the laws of physics," I say to Dr. Russell from two mouths. And he says, "You're in." And then he taps that goddamned PDA of his. And there's just one of me again. The other me. I can tell because I'm no longer staring at the new me anymore, I'm looking at the old me. And it stares at me like it knows something truly strange has just happened. And then the stare seems to say, I'm no longer needed. And then it closes its eyes. — John Scalzi

From the moment you're born, people start folding you into neat pieces and tucking you inside a box of their own design. No, it starts even before then, the moment the sonogram shows a faded blur. Blue for a boy, tractors and race-cars, big and strong and brave. Pink for a little princess, pretty and sweet. They dress you up in their own expectations, before you even have a chance to understand the constrictions of your fate. That box becomes so cosy and warm, you never really notice that you're bent double, fighting for room to breathe. I — Abigail Haas

You had room for four kids sitting or six standing up. It had been a pirate ship, Nemo's Nautilus, and a canoe for the Lenni Lennape among other things. Today the water was maybe three and a half feet deep. She seemed happy to be there, not scared at all. "We call this the Big Rock," I said. "We used to, I mean. When we were kids." "I like it," she said. "Can I see the crayfish? I'm Meg." "I'm David. Sure." She peered down into the can. Time went by and we said nothing. She studied them. Then she straightened up again. "Neat." "I just catch 'em and look at 'em awhile and then let them go." "Do they bite?" "The big ones do. They can't hurt you, though. And the little ones just try to run." "They look like lobsters." "You never saw a crayfish before? — Jack Ketchum

You look in my room and it looks neat enough, but if you dared to look under my bed or in my closet, oh what a mess! — Tamera Mowry

I am like that guy on the 'Odd Couple,' and it is not the neat guy. I go into my room and find pieces of pizza under the laundry. — Rick Majerus

MARCH, 1846
I have at last got the little room I have wanted so long, and am very happy about it. It does me good to be alone, and Mother has made it very pretty and neat for me. My work-basket and desk are by the window, and my closet is full of dried herbs that smell very nice. The door that opens into the garden will be very pretty in summer, and I can run off to the woods when I like. — Louisa May Alcott

Muslim Girlhood

I never found myself in a pink aisle.
There was no box for me
with glossy cellophane like heat
and a neat packet of instructions in six languages.

Evenings, I watched TV like a religion I moderately believed.
I watched to see how the others lived, not knowing I was the other - no laugh track in my living room, no tidy and punctual resolution waiting.

I took tests in which Jane & William had so many apples.

I fasted through birthday parties
and Christmas parties
and ate leftover tajine at plastic lunch tables,
picked at pepperoni from slices like blemishes and tried not to complain.

I prayed at the wrong times in the wrong tongue.
I hungered for Jell-O & Starburts & margarine;
could read mono- and diglycerides by five,
knew what gelatin meant, and
where it came from. — Leila Chatti

I want to make a world more magical than my own. I don't care if it makes sense, I don't care if it's ridiculed or if, rather than a neat round planet that goes around forever, it ends with a cliff that falls off into nothing. I want to have my eyes wide open, and I want to see this room and at the same time, not this room. — Lauren DeStefano

If ever there were a true "just as I am" church, if ever there were a community where everybody could bring all their baggage and brokenness with them without neat and tidy happy endings quite yet, if ever there was a group where everyone was loved and no one pretended - we could not make enough room inside the building. — John Ortberg

That's because stacked on and around her desk, in neat skyscraper-high columns, are books. About three dozen of them. For a moment, I freeze, my mouth open and my eyes wide with shock. Then, inanely, I wonder how the hell she got them all up here. Kate weighs a buck-ten at best. There's got to be several hundred pounds of pages in this room. It's then that her shiny dark head emerges over the horizon. And, once again, she smiles. Like a cat with a mouthful of bird. — Emma Chase

The dining-room was in the good taste of the period. It was very severe. There was a high dado of white wood and a green paper on which were etchings by Whistler in neat black frames. The green curtains with their peacock design, hung in straight lines, and the green carpet, in the pattern of which pale rabbits frolicked among leafy trees, suggested the influence of William Morris. There was blue delft on the chimneypiece. At that time there must have been five hundred dining-rooms in London decorated in exactly the same manner. It was chaste, artistic, and dull. — W. Somerset Maugham

We take off for New Jersey. Gigantic landscape of factories, bridges, and railroads. And then, suddenly, East Orange and a countryside as postcard as can be, with thousands of neat and tidy cottages like toys in the midst of tall poplars and magnolias. I'm shown in the little public library, bright and gay, which the neighborhood uses a lot - with a huge room for children. (Finally a country where the children are really taken care of.) — Albert Camus

In my room, I looked around at all the pieces of my life, neat and tidy on their little shelves, my clothes and books and telephones, my shoes and hair barrettes, and tried to care about them. Mine, mine, mine. But they were only things, things that could have belonged to anyone. — Aryn Kyle

Later, after Abby had lugged Fred back inside and was taking off his jacket, she heard a crinkling sound and reached into the pocket of her coat. Her hand closed around an envelope. She pulled it out and saw her name in neat printing. ABIGAIL. She waited until she was alone in her room to open it, and inside she found a card showing a girl and boy joyfully riding a giant bumblebee, the words Valentine, I'm abuzz over you trailing in the wake of the bee. She flipped the card open. Zander had written BEE MINE, ZANDER in the same neat handwriting. Abby frowned, then smiled, and added the card to the ones she'd received from Rose and Sarah the day before. She hadn't dared to give Zander a Valentine. — Ann M. Martin

People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two loves, but this, too, was great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. Before the world existed, before it was populated, and before there were wars and jobs and colleges and movies and clothes and opinions and foreign travel
before all of these things there had been only one person, Zora, and only one place: a tent in the living room made from chairs and bed-sheets. After a few years, Levi arrived; space was made for him; it was as if he had always been. Looking at them both now, Jerome found himself in their finger joints and neat conch ears, in their long legs and wild curls. He heard himself in their partial lisps caused by puffy tongues vibrating against slightly noticeable buckteeth. He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away. — Zadie Smith

Rosie had to keep her room neat enough so James would not freak out, but not so neat that they could figure it all out, break the code, of who you truly were, what you were up to, your values, your truest parts ... you were layer upon layer of ideas and erasures and new ideas and soul and images. [p. 68] — Anne Lamott

It's [a miscarriage] all very thief-in-the-night. No one really knows what to say. You go into the emergency room, you think you're going to be a mum and you walk out empty. It's all neat and tidy, there's this potential being in your life and you're empty - all cleaned up and put back together, but completely shattered. — Tori Amos

I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry. When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch unregarded I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes down with all its feet on the floor. None of those resonances and lovely echoes that break and chime from nerve to nerve in our breasts making wild music, false phrases. I have done with phrases. — Virginia Woolf

She stood in the middle of my bedroom, gazing around with wide eyes. I hadn't made my bed. In three years. And the walls were plastered with wakeboarding posters and snowboarding posters and surfing posters (I was going to learn to snowboard and surf someday, too). It all might have been overwhelming at first-not exactly House Beautiful.
"Is this McGillicuddy's room?" she asked.
"What! No. McGillicuddy's a neat freak. Also he collects Madame Alexander dolls."
She turned her wide eyes on me.
"Kidding! I'm kidding," I backtracked. Why did I have to make up stuff like that? My family was weird enough for real. — Jennifer Echols

I was too tired to think. I merely felt the town as a unique unreality. What was it? I knew
the moon's picture of a town. These streets with their houses did not exist, they were but a ludicrous projection of the moon's sumptuous personality. This was a city of Pretend, created by the hypnotism of moonnight.
Yet when I examined the moon she too seemed but a painting of a moon and the sky in which she lived a fragile echo of color. If I blew hard the whole shy mechanism would collapse gently with a neat soundless crash. I must not, or lose all. — E. E. Cummings

Down in the kitchen, I open the refrigerator. There is nothing there but the prize steer of the county fair, rearranged in neat and mysterious packages. Daily, the cook pushes her hand into the cold. The result in uncertain. A gristly Ouija. It could be pot roast or brisket, eye of the round or sirloin tip. The steer has invaded their lives. He is everywhere. There is no room for the sisters' diet-cola or for their underwear on sizzling mornings. They have been eating him for weeks. — Joy Williams

Thought is pleasing. Her room is small, neat, and girlish: all whites, creams, and baby blues, and bathed in the soft glow of her bedside lamp. It's also a little empty, but I spy — E.L. James

A number of his friends whose wilfully overburdened lives inhibited the enjoyment of all but necessary pleasures somehow found time to take afternoon tea with the Ackroyds in their neat Edwardian villa in Swiss Cottage with its comfortable sitting-room and atmosphere of timeless indulgence. — P.D. James