Suburban House Quotes & Sayings

As G. K. Chesterton wrote, "How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it."22 — Ann Voskamp

The peach siding created a gorgeous contrast to the stucco walls and the dark-brown roof tiles - a fairytale house in a fairytale suburban neighborhood. She rolled her eyes. Too bad life had been anything but. — Katherine McIntyre

We used to think that energy and water would be the critical issues for the next century. Now we think water will be the critical issue. — Mostafa Kamal Tolba

A darkened theater. Final whispers. Black. The projector streams through. The picture surrounds. I fall away. You reach me. — Jolene Stockman

It stood calm against the suburban storm raging around it. The thunder screamed across the sky; it slapped the clouds into a heated turmoil that flew towards the south. — J.D. Stroube

I used to want to witness to people, to tell them the story of God in digestible pieces, to win them over to my side. But more and more I am hearing the still small voice calling me to be the witness. To live in proximity to pain and suffering and injustice instead of high-tailing it to a more calm and isolated life. To live with eyes wide open on the edges of our world, the margins of our society — D.L. Mayfield

Bones smiled. Oh, grand. Going to make me beat the truth out of you? My favorite way to work. — Jeaniene Frost

If we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday at a time of presidential inaugurals, this is thanks to Ronald Reagan who created the holiday, and not to the Democratic Congress of the Carter years, which rejected it. — David Horowitz

Contention in our families drives the Spirit of the Lord away. It also drives many of our family members away. Contention ranges from a hostile spoken word to worldwide conflicts. — Ezra Taft Benson

Walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the same street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of wheels. — Geoff Nicholson

Levi's gaze sought out Miss Spencer. Eden. All she had to do was smile to release those little frissons of lightning in him.
As that thought crossed his mind, she glanced up, and Levi realized he was wrong. She didn't have to smile. All she had to do was look at him.
Heaven help him. He was in bad. — Karen Witemeyer

This house is a prison, a suburban Alcatraz. — Heather Demetrios

I was not brought up to know the Earth in intimate detail. No one I can remember from my childhood ever suggested that the land I lived on and was surrounded by contained anything important to me. My sense of kinship was connected to my house, my bedroom (my one almost personal space), my family, and my friends. I had no conscious sense of connection to the wild; the closest I came was that I deeply loved the trees in our small suburban backyard. — Robin Rose Bennett

Imagine America as one house on a suburban lane. Years before he became a Jehovah's Witness, Prince knocked on America's door through his music. He came to the door holding a guitar and an umbrella while concealing a Bible. He flirted his way inside the door and told us he had a dirty mind and was controversial, and then he sat down in the living room on the good couch. And, when America's guard was down, because we thought we were having a conversation about sex, Prince eased out his Bible and said, "Let me also tell you about my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. — Toure

If you want to see how far we have not come from the cave and the woods, from the lonely and dangerous days of the prarie or the plain, witness the reaction of a modern suburban family, nearly ready for bed, when the doorbell rings or the door is rattled. They will stop where they stand, or sit bolt upright in their beds, as if a streak of pure lightning has passed through the house. Eyes wide, voices fearful, they will whisper to each other, "There's someone at the door," in a way that might make you believe they have always feared and anticipated this moment - that they have spent their lives being stalked. — Alice McDermott

I was taught that candles are like house cats - domesticated versions of something wild and dangerous. There's no way to know how much of that killer instinct lurks in the darkness. I used to think the house-burning paranoia was the result of some upper-middle-class fear regarding the potential destruction of a half-million-dollar Westchester house the size of a matchbox. But then I realized the fear stemmed from something far less complex: we're not used to fire. Candles are a staple of the Judaic existence and, like many suburban residents before us, we're pretty bad Jews. — Sloane Crosley

I'm a big Germs fan; most people are. — Henry Rollins

The life force is vigorous. The delight that accompanies it counter-balances all the pains and hardships that confront men. It makes life worth living. — W. Somerset Maugham

When the windows like the jackal's eye and desire pierce the dawn, silken windlasses lift me up to suburban footbridges. I summon a girl who is dreaming in the little gilded house; she meets me on the piles of black moss and offers me her lips which are stones in the rapid river depths. Veiled forebodings descend the buildings' steps. The best thing is to flee from the great feather cylinders when the hunters limp into the sodden lands. If you take a bath in the watery patterns of the streets, childhood returns to the country like a greyhound. Man seeks his prey in the breezes and the fruits are drying on the screens of pink paper, in the shadow of the names overgrown by forgetfulness. Joys and sorrows spread in the town. Gold and eucalyptus, similarly scented, attack dreams. Among the bridles and the dark edelweiss subterranean forms are resting like perfumers' corks. — Andre Breton

I'm aware of the stereotype many liberals have about conservative Catholics. The former believe the latter don't think - that conservative religious people don't care about facts and rigorous inquiry. But my conservative Catholic parents were thinkers. Twice as often as my parents told their four children to go wash, they told us to go look something up. At our suburban tract house on Long Island in the 1970s, our parents shelved the Encyclopaedia Britannica right next to the dinner table so we could easily reach for a volume to settle the frequent debates. The rotating stack of periodicals in our kitchen included not only religiously oriented newsletters, but also the New York Times and National Geographic. Our parents took us to science museums, woke us up for lunar eclipses, and pushed us to question our textbooks and even our teachers when they sounded wrong. — Alice Domurat Dreger

I want to be stereotyped. I want to be classified. I want to be a clone. I want to be masochistic. I want to be sadistic. I want a Suburban Home. I don't want no hipppie pad; I want a house just like Mom and Dad. — Milo Aukerman

I was born in 1968 and grew up in my grandmother's house in suburban Connecticut, where I was convinced a ghost named Virgil lived in the attic. — Jennifer McMahon

Californians have brought suburb-making almost to an art. Their cities and their country-side are equally suburban. No-one has a country house in California; no-one has a city house. It is good to see trees always from city windows, but it is not so good always to see houses from country windows. — Stella Benson

How fair doth Nature
Appear again!
How bright the sunbeams!
How smiles the plain!
The flow'rs are bursting
From ev'ry bough,
And thousand voices
Each bush yields now.
And joy and gladness
Fill ev'ry breast!
Oh earth!-oh sunlight!
Oh rapture blest!
Oh love! oh loved one! — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Consider a white ninth-grade student taking American history in a predominantly middle-class town in Vermont. Her father tapes Sheetrock, earning an income that in slow construction seasons leaves the family quite poor. Her mother helps out by driving a school bus part-time, in addition to taking care of her two younger siblings. The girl lives with her family in a small house, a winterized former summer cabin, while most of her classmates live in large suburban homes. How is this girl to understand her poverty? Since history textbooks present the American past as four hundred years of progress and portray our society as a land of opportunity in which folks get what they deserve and deserve what they get, the failures of working-class Americans to transcend their class origin inevitably get laid at their own doorsteps. — James W. Loewen

The afternoon had passed to a ghostly gray. She was struck by the immensity of things, so much water and sky and forest, and after a time it occurred to her that she'd lived a life almost entirely indoors. Her memories were indoor memories, fixed by ceilings and plastered white walls. Her whole life had been locked to geometries: suburban rectangles, city squares. First the house she'd grown up in, then dorms and apartments. The open air had been nothing but a medium of transit, a place for rooms to exist. — Tim O'Brien

They both went to opposite sides of the bed, snapped on their bedside lamps and pulled back the cover in a smooth, practiced, synchronized move that proved, depending on Madeline's mood, that they either had the perfect marriage or that they were stuck in a middle-class suburban rut and they needed to sell the house and go traveling around India. — Liane Moriarty

It's a rented house right along the Mississippi River, a house that screams Suburban Nouveau Riche, the kind of place I aspired to as a kid from my split-level, shag-carpet side of town. The kind of house that is immediately familiar: a generically grand, unchallenging, new, new, new house that my wife would-and did-detest. 'Should I remove my soul before I come inside?' Her first line upon arrival. — Gillian Flynn

husband, Dave, my daughter, and I had moved out of Cen- ter City and into a house in Haverford that I refused to call a McMansion, even though that's exactly what it was, but I loved Ellie's pediatrician so much that 1'd never even tried to find a suburban replacement. — Jennifer Weiner

There is no need to invent an ego that is separate from the divine if our basic human nature is trusted. If we trust ourselves, we know how to avoid interfering with nature and how to live in harmony. When we know God as an unseen, loving, and accepting power at the heart of everything, allowing us to make our own choices, then God is a trusted part of our nature. — Wayne Dyer

Everything was fine with the Zen Lunatics, the nut wagon was too far away to hear us. But there was a wisdom in it all, as you'll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels. You'll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen Lunatics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips. — Jack Kerouac

Moving is a well-established tradition in America, and _moving up_ constitutes a significant part of the American dream. Not only is working one's way to a bigger house central to our ethos but it makes sense functionally as families bring more children into the world. But why must the move to a larger or more luxurious house bring with it the abandonment of one's neighbors, community groups, and often even schoolmates? The suburban pod system causes people to move not just from house to house but form community to community. Only in a traditionally organized neighborhood of varied incomes can a family significantly alter its housing without going very far. In the new suburbs, you can't move up without moving out. (The same is true of moving down. Seniors seeking a smaller house are often forced to abandon their familiar community and start over someplace else.) — Andres Duany

In the suburban Midwestern Reform Jewish world I was raised in, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, grown men built plastic scale models of Israeli tanks and F-15 jets and displayed them throughout the house, dangling the warplanes from bedroom ceilings with fishing line. — Rick Perlstein

I think uncertainty is good for things. Certainty breeds complacency and complacency means that you just sit somewhere in your nice little comfortable suburban house in Michigan, looking at CNN and saying, "Oh, those poor immigrant children that are all coming across the border. But we really can't have them here - that isn't what God wants. Let's send them all back to the drug cartels." There's a complacency to it. — Stephen King

People can't live with themselves much longer. The planet cannot live with humans much longer! We have the weaponry, destruction of the planet, pollution, destruction of forests, countless manifestations of humans using their intelligence in the service of the dysfunction, the madness. It's a strange juxtaposition. Humans are intelligent, but if you look at history or even watch TV, they're also incredibly stupid. — Eckhart Tolle

If you follow the suburban fashion in building a sumptuous- looking house for a little money, it will appear to all eyes as a cheap, dear house. — Ralph Waldo Emerson