Small Apartment Quotes & Sayings

I live in a small apartment. There's only so much Batman memorabilia a guy can hang on to in New York City. — Robin Lord Taylor

Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Well, I drank enough to sustain a small Spanish village, I haven't had an orgasm in a thousand years, and I will probably die old and alone in a beautifully designed apartment with all of Clive's illegitimate children swarming around me ... How do you think I feel? — Alice Clayton

In effect, the apartment block was a small vertical city, its two thousand inhabitants boxed up into the sky.j.g. — J.G. Ballard

I hate living in a really small apartment, living in a shoebox, not being able to play the drums, not having space. It sucks. — Mac DeMarco

I was going to watch Project Runway," said Jace. "It's on next."
"No, you're not," said Magnus. He snapped his fingers and the TV went off, releasing a small puff of smoke as the picture died. "You need to deal with this."
"Suddenly you're interested in solving my problems?"
"I'm interested in getting my apartment back. I'm tired of you cleaning all the time. — Cassandra Clare

The girl with the greyhound was an assistant lighting director for a musical comedy about American history, and she kept her poor greyhound, who was named Lancer, in a one-room apartment fourteen feet wide and twenty-six feet long, and six flights of stairs above the street level. His entire life was devoted to unloading his excrement at the proper time and place. There were two proper places to put it: in the gutter outside the door seventy-two steps below, with the traffic whizzing by, or in a roasting pan, his mistress kept in front of the Westinghouse refrigerator.
Lancer had a very small brain, but he must have suspected from time to time, just as Wayne Hoobler did, that some kind of terrible mistake had been made. — Kurt Vonnegut

He still felt just as light-headed, and a loop of the scene of the kiss kept playing in his head. It was already a cult film in his memory. Finally he opened the door to his apartment and found his living room much too small in comparison with his appetite for living. — David Foenkinos

Something else you should really know about me. When I get nervous, my fingers shake. I've noticed this a lot recently. When mother and father argue and their voices are falling around the small family apartment, when their voices are banging against my bedroom door, I can feel my fingers start to move. I tell my fingers to stop and, sometimes, they do. But if I look at my hands closely, once I've told them to stop, and I try to focus on keeping them as still as possible, I notice that they are still moving. — Kerem Mermutlu

The first theatre I ever found was in the backyard of a new suburban community in the foothills of the Poconos. My dad was a young FBI agent at his first or second posting - we're all from New York. He was posted in Scranton, Pennsylvania and he put the family in a brand new red-brick apartment. It was in a C-shape and behind it was a small hill that led up to the woods. There was a white-washed brick wall that was a perfect theatre! There were windows and all the ladies behind the windows in their apartments. I would go out there after lunch every day and sing opera. — Constantin Stanislavski

Maybe what will really work is we all need to have a fear tree in our backyard or a small fear plant growing on our apartment windowsill. When we are feeling uneasy we pluck a few leaves and find the right place to put them. Champagne would be the number one choice but spaghetti works, too. Have a little fear at least once a week and you will build up your resistance. Like a vaccination. Then, when wars and hatreds come along you'll be able to recognize that's just another expression of Fear. No thanks, I've had my quota. — Nikki Giovanni

merrymaking. Yes, Katie would enjoy America, Frances thought as she put on her coat and her hat; in fact, America would enjoy Katie. She left her apartment block and, crossing the road, walked the short distance to the Ninth Avenue Elevated line at South Ferry. Although the elevated line took longer, she preferred not to take the subway system, being slightly claustrophobic. The idea of speeding along in a small underground train made her feel dizzy, so she preferred to travel aboveground by the El for her day of work as a domestic at the Walker-Browns' residence. As she took her familiar journey north that morning, along Greenwich Street and Battery Place to Gansevoort Street in lower Manhattan and on to Ninth Avenue — Hazel Gaynor

With the computer and stuff, the difference between a rich guy and a poor guy, to me, is nothing. Because I don't like big houses, I don't drive a car, so you know, I just live in a small apartment and I have my computer, which is really cool. — Norm MacDonald

Did your parents care that he was white?"
"They never met him." I couldn't imagine taking him to meet my dad. Watching them talk to each other would've been tortuous. Also, I never wanted him to see how small our apartment was. In the end, I guess I really didn't want him to know me.
With Daniel, it's different somehow. I want him to see all of me. — Nicola Yoon

I didn't grow up in a small New England town like the one in 'The Sundial.' I was raised in an apartment building in Queens, not in a sprawling, slightly sinister mansion like the one where the Halloran family resides. — Victor LaValle

But even though our old home had physically seen better days, I knew in that moment that we had taken the soul of that house with us to our new home. And as I branched out and left our small town, I'd taken all the best bits of home life - the essence of its soul - with me wherever I went. It's the soul that matters most, after all. And even though over the years I've lived in everything from a cramped dorm room at school to a grand apartment in Paris and finally to our family town home in Santa Monica, I have taken the soul of home with me, wherever I am. — Jennifer L. Scott

In the city, I wake bolt upright in the small hours, convinced that intruders are marauding through our apartment despite Swiss bank-style security arrangements. — Mariella Frostrup

I once spent an entire night in a hotel in New York looking across the way into someone's apartment where nothing was happening but daily life, a phone call, television watching, staring into the fridge. Seeing how those strangers lived over that small distance and in absolute silence moved me deeply. — Lauren Groff

The buildings appear to be glued together, mostly small houses and apartment blocks that looked nervous. There is murky snow spread out like carpet. There is concrete, empty hat-stand trees, and gray air. — Markus Zusak

He saw that there was something alive in it, and went near enough to read a sign that said, TWO DEADLY ENEMIES. HAVE A LOOK FREE. There was a black bear about four feet long and very thin, resting on the floor of the cage; his back was spotted with bird lime that had been shot down on him by a small chicken hawk sitting on a perch in the upper part of the same apartment. Mose of the hawk's tail was gone; the bear only had one eye. — Flannery O'Connor

The whole scene gave Ashley a fierce ache in the center of her chest. Everything her eyes came across spoke to how these two men lived in some kind of world where hardship was the constant, with only these tiny spaces between heartbeats offering some kind of peace. She saw an apartment that housed two men who lived whatever life they could in the confines of that small space because everything else was no good for anyone. — Sheldon Lee Compton

The bedroom in my apartment is far too small to hold a nightstand. There is, however, this bookshelf. Yes, I stow whatever I'm reading on the lower shelf, but more importantly, it's where I keep a collection of ghost books. — Matthew Tobin Anderson

Virtually every Chinese citizen whom I came to know well was doing something technically illegal, although usually the infraction was so minor that they didn't have to worry. It might be a sketchy apartment registration or a small business that bought its products from unlicensed wholesalers. Sometimes, it was comic: late at night, there were always people out walking their dogs in Beijing, because the official dog registration was ridiculously expensive. The dogs were usually ratlike Pekingese, led by sleepy owners who snapped to alertness if they saw a cop. They were guerillas walking toy dogs. — Peter Hessler

I live in a small apartment in London, not some big house with a lot of security. I don't like too much security. There's no freedom. I'm a person, not some precious diamond that needs guarding every second. — Julian Lennon

Let me end this chapter with an encouraging story. A young man found his way up to the small apartment of Nisargadatta, my old Hindu guru in Bombay, asked him a spiritual question and then left after this one question. One of the regular students then asked, "What will happen to this man? Will he ever become enlightened or will he fall off the path and go back to sleep?" Nisargadatta said, "It's too late for him! He has already begun. Just the fact that he came up here and asked one question about what is his true nature means that that place in him that knows who he really is has started to wake up. Even if it takes a long, long time, there's no turning back. — Jack Kornfield

Fortunately for me, I'm married to an amazing woman - Nancy Lasseter - who is wise enough not to let me buy every car I want. If I was single, I would be living in a very small apartment and renting a warehouse full of cool cars. — John Lasseter

She lived with the doctor on Via Po, in a gloomy, dark apartment, barely warmed in winter by just a small Franklin stove, and she no longer threw out anything, because everything might eventually come in handy: not even the cheese rinds or the foil on chocolates, with which she made silver balls to be sent to missions to free a little black boy. — Primo Levi

Hangovers are a vivid form of vengeance. Last night my apartment became the venue for a small, introverted chardonnay festival. A melancholy choir of Bulgarians provided the entertainment, via a set of headphones that ended up irredeemably tangled beneath the bed. Part of me just watched. The other part was in charge. — Liz Jensen

I was growing stale in London. I was tired of doing much the same thing everyday. My friends pursued their course with uneventfulness; they had no longer any surprises for me, and when I met them I knew pretty well what they would say; even their love-affairs had a tedious banality. We were like tram-cars running on their lines from terminus to terminus, and it was possible to calculate within small limits the number of passengers they would carry. Life was ordered too pleasantly. I was seized with panic. I gave up my small apartment, sold my few belongings, and resolved to start afresh. — W. Somerset Maugham

I envision a day when every city and town has front and back yards, community gardens and growing spaces, nurtured into life by neighbors who are no longer strangers, but friends who delight in the edible rewards offered from a garden they discovered together. Imagine small strips of land between apartment buildings that have been turned into vegetable gardens, and urban orchards planted at schools and churches to grow food for our communities. The seeds of the urban farming movement already are growing within our reality. — Greg Peterson

I was born in Chicago in 1927, the only child of Morris and Mildred Markowitz, who owned a small grocery store. We lived in a nice apartment, always had enough to eat, and I had my own room. I never was aware of the Great Depression. — Harry Markowitz

NIGHT 1: LEXI

Lexi arrives at eleven o'clock wearing a black lace dress that is both sexy and modest at the same time. It comes to just above her knees and the v-neckline reveals a hint of her small, round breasts. She's wearing black stockings and short heels, and I'm curious to see if she's wearing a garter belt under there. Her thick brown hair falls to her shoulders and her large brown eyes make her look innocent and doe-like.

"Come in," I say opening the door wide and stepping aside. Lexi hesitates for a second then comes in, looking around at our small studio apartment. The room is dimly lit by shaded lamps, letting most of the light come in through the uncurtained windows. I can see the full moon framed against one pane. In the center of the room is our four-poster king sized bed. Eric is lying on the red silk sheets. — Marketa Giavonni

Gra was always mildly irritated by any display of decorum, or good taste, if he felt it was a direct challenge to his deepest beliefs. When I mentioned once that Connie and I had guests coming to dinner that evening who were a bit formal and stuck-up, he carefully cut out some very small pieces of paper, wrote an obscenity on each one, and then hid them round our flat in all the rooms our guests were likely to visit. Connie found one of these just ten minutes before they were due to arrive: a moment of pure panic that set off a frenzied paperchase, as we raced around the apartment trying to find them all before the doorbell rang. We missed one, which he had placed on the basin in the visitors' loo. It simply read, 'Anus'. I've always wondered whether our guests speculated why we might have put it there. — John Cleese

Still, sometimes they leave behind a small memento, like Haida and the boxed set of Years of Pilgrimage. He probably didn't simply forget it, but intentionally left it behind in Tsukuru's apartment. And Tsukuru loved that music, for it connected him to Haida, and to Shiro. It was the vein that connected these three scattered people. A fragile, thin vein, but one that still had living, red blood coursing through it. The power of music made it possible. Whenever he listened to that music, particularly "Le mal du pays," vivid memories of the two of them swept over him. At times it even felt like they were right beside him, quietly breathing. — Haruki Murakami

Abby: I could be a slave to your darkest desires. I can do things. Anything you want.
Tommy: Well, that's terrific, because we have a lot of laundry piled up and the apartment is a wreck.
Abby: Anything you desire, my lord. I can do laundry, clean, bring you small creatures to quench your thirst until I am worthy. — Christopher Moore

Over the years I suffered poverty and rejection and came to believe that my mother had formed me for a freedom that was unattainable, a delusion. Then ... I was ... confined to this small apartment in this alien city of Rochester. ... Looking about, I saw millions of old people in my situation, wailing like lost puppies because they were alone and had no one to talk to. But they had become enslaved by habits which bound their lives to warm bodies that talked. I was free! Although my mother had ceased to be a warm body in 1944, she had not forsaken me. She comforts me with every book I read. Once again I am five, leaning on her shoulder, learning the words as she reads aloud 'Alice in Wonderland'. — Louise Brooks

I grew up in Burbank - but not the Burbank of valet parking and TV studios. In the late 1950s, there was a small apartment complex on Elmwood Avenue that rented mostly to families on welfare. I lived there from age 3 to 11 and again from 14 to 18 with my mother, Shirley, and my younger sister, Toni. — Rene Russo

For example, when Seymour told one of the twins or Zooey or Franny or even Mme. Boo Boo (who was only two years younger than myself, and often entirely the Lady), to take off his or her galoshes on coming into the apartment, each and all of them knew he mostly meant that the floor would get tracked up if they didn't and that Bessie would have to get out the mop. When I told them to take off their galoshes, they knew I mostly meant that people who didn't were slobs. It was bound to make no small difference in the way they kidded or ragged us separately. — J.D. Salinger

I lived with my mom in a really small apartment. My bedroom was like in the living room. That's why I still love to sleep on couches now. — Alicia Keys

I mean I feel like we've shot all these different movies. Like the first 2 weeks of shooting was all Steve Stills apartment and band rehearsal, you know? And so it was like this tiny little group of people and small set comparatively and it just looked like a Toronto apartment. And then we sort of kept ramping up further and further until now we're here in this giant like craziest set I've ever seen with LCD crazy lights that go ... you know? — Alison Pill

Prison left me with some strange little tics.' She has taken all the door off their hinges in all the apartments she has lived in since. It's not that she has anxiety attacks about small spaces, she says, it's just that she starts to sweat and go cold. 'This apartment is perfect for me,' she says, looking around the open space.
'How about elevators?' I ask, recalling the schlepp up the stairs.
'Exactly,' she replies, 'I don't like them much either.'
One day, years later, her husband Charlie was fooling around at home, playing the guitar. Miriam said something provocative and he stood up suddenly, lifting his arm to take off the guitar strap. He was probably just going to say 'That's outrageous', or tickle her or tackle her. But she was gone. She was already down in the courtyard of the building. She does not remember getting down the stairs-it was an automatic flight reaction. — Anna Funder

the help of friends I rearranged my small apartment to accommodate a grown-up baby, and warily crept each morning from a — Barbara Kingsolver

To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal. — Herman Melville

Now I sat at the small table in my apartment. There was the hum of the room. The sound of the blade cutting through the chicken. The sound of wine in my throat. Returning the glass to the table. I tried to be perfectly still. I held my breath and imagined myself alone in Paris. In a room in a city holding my breath. — Alexander Maksik

Somewhere in the city, an orange cat finished chewing on a marjoram plant next to his studio apartment's door and leapt purring onto the shoulder of his owner, home early from work. Somewhere in the city, a young Chinese pianist sat down at a rehearsal hall and let his fingers play the first opening notes of the Emperor Concerto, notes that would envelop the small girl in row D of the Philharmonic that night in a shimmering cloud. A boy in Staten Island touched his finger to the lower back of the girl who had been just a friend until then. A woman in Hell's Kitchen stood in her dark attic garret, her paintbrush in hand, and stepped back from the painting of chartreuse highway and forest-green sky that had taken her two years to complete. A clerk in a Brooklyn bodega tapped her crimson fingernail on a box of gripe water, reassuring the new mother holding a wailing baby, and the mother's grateful smile almost made both of them cry themselves. — Stephanie Clifford

I think in certain ways sex work has been romanticized. I can only speak from my experience, but what surprised me about escorting was how boring it mostly is. it seemed like an assembly line process of cleaning my apartment, dressing up, making awkward small talk, having mundane mechanical sex, making more awkward small talk, and then closing the door after them. There's also a lot of frustration and annoyance with it that I feel isn't discussed (a lot of flaky potential clients for instance.) — Marie Calloway

The world of Manhattan is small and tightly knit, and the man on top retains a certain humility. He knows how far and fast he can fall by looking at the guy across the street. The view from the $250,000 apartment covers a lot of ground, most of it condemned. — Herb Caen

I walked to the windows and pulled the shades up and opened the windows wide. The night air came drifting in with a kind of stale sweetness that still remembered automobile exhausts and the streets of the city. I reached for my drink and drank it slowly. The apartment house door closed itself down below me. Steps tinkled on the quiet sidewalk. A car started up not far away. It rushed off into the night with a rough clashing of gears. I went back to the bed and looked down at it. The imprint of her head was still in the pillow, of her small corrupt body still on the sheets. I put my empty glass down and tore the bed to pieces savagely. — Raymond Chandler

Means. And her small, chic penthouse apartment — Danielle Steel

But her beauty and stillness broke the balance in me. In my small apartment, she kissed me, and the ground opened up, swallowed me, buried me right there in that moment. How many awful poems did I write thinking of her? I know now what she was to me - the first glimpse of a space-bridge, a wormhole, a galactic portal off this bound and blind planet. She had seen other worlds, and she held the lineage of other worlds, spectacularly, in the vessel of her black body. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

At any rate, after five years Surak came out of the wilds, took a small apartment in the capital, near his parents' house, and began to write for the information networks. — Diane Duane

I had to share a room with my sister, who is five and a half years older than I am. We didn't get along well, and I felt that I had no privacy. So books were my privacy, because no one could join me in a book, no one could comment on the action or make fun of it. I used to spend hours reading in the bathroom
and we only had one bathroom in our small apartment! — Gail Carson Levine

Don't make each room a different color in a small apartment or you'll make yourself nervous. — Elsie De Wolfe

The roots of a child's ability to cope and thrive, regardless of circumstance, lie in that child's having had at least a small, safe place (an apartment? a room? a lap?) in which, in the companionship of a loving person, that child could discover that he or she was lovable and capable of loving in return. If a child finds this during the first years of life, he or she can grow up to be a competent, healthy person. — Fred Rogers

We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances, assuming that what happens to us (or fails to happen) determines how we feel. From this perspective, the small-scale details of how you spend your day aren't that important, because what matters are the large-scale outcomes, such as whether or not you get a promotion or move to that nicer apartment. According to Gallagher, decades of research contradict this understanding. Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to. — Cal Newport

Would it have killed her to play along? To have told Pauline, Oh my! You're kidding! What a scandal! If gossip gave Pauline pleasure why deny her? Surely there was little enough pleasure for Pauline outside of work. A mother she'd nursed through cancer, a brother she was estranged from because of a terrible wife, a small apartment and a cheap landlord and an unending series of contacts with people - a grocer, a butcher, a waitress, a salesclerk, a bus driver - who did not meet her expectations. — Alice McDermott

My parents were ordinary people; we lived in a small apartment. — Viktor Vekselberg

Did I tell you about Anton?" Loots said.
Anton?" I shook my head.
It was a week ago, Loots said. There had been a knock on the door of his apartment and when he opened it his old friend Anton was standing there. Anton was a clown. He belonged to a circus that toured the provinces, playing to small towns and villages. They talked about the old days for a while, but Anton became increasingly restless and distracted. In the end Loots had to ask him if there was something wrong.
This is going to sound strange." The clown coughed nervously into his fist. "It's The Invisible Man. He's disappeared."
Loots stared at his friend.
He just vanished," Anton said, "into thin air."
The Invisible Man?" Loots said.
Yes."
He's disappeared?"
I told you it would sound strange," Anton said. — Rupert Thomson

Are you murdering more eggs for breakfast?" Japhet raised his head as the sound of boiling water filled the small apartment.
"Don't insult my eggs, Buchanan."
"You insulted my roasted chicken, Kappel, so I can insult your eggs all I want. — Jack Lewis Baillot