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This Old House Quotes & Sayings

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This Old House Quotes By Deirdre Savoy

BODY OF LIES When he looked at her again, he gestured toward her attire. "I take it you haven't packed anything yet." "No." "You know you can't stay here, Alex." She did. She didn't want to stay, either. She'd found sleep only because she was exhausted, but since waking, every creak and groan of the old house had put her on edge. More than she feared anything this killer might do, she didn't want to feel so isolated any longer. At least in her home, things were familiar. Even if — Deirdre Savoy

This Old House Quotes By Cornell Woolrich

The old frame house down near the waterfront had never held so many people since the day it was put up. It must have been a pleasant place fifty years before: trees overhanging the limpid water, cows grazing in the meadows on both sides of the river, little frame houses like this one dotting the banks here and there.
It wasn't a pleasant place any more: garbage scows, coal yards, the river a greasy gray soup. Dead-end blocks of decrepit tenements on one side of it, lumberyards and ice-plants and tall stacks on the other.
The house was set far back from the street, hemmed in by the blank walls that rose around it.
("I Wouldn't Be In Your Shoes") — Cornell Woolrich

This Old House Quotes By Matt Haig

Let's not forget The Things They Do To Make Themselves Happy That Actually Make Them Miserable. This is an infinite list. It includes - shopping, watching TV, taking the better job, getting the bigger house, writing a semi-autobiographical novel, educating their young, making their skin look mildly less old and harboring a vague desire to believe there might be a meaning to it all. — Matt Haig

This Old House Quotes By Milan Kundera

Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise
the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer. — Milan Kundera

This Old House Quotes By Louisa May Alcott

This household happiness did not come all at once, but John and Meg had found the key to it, and each year of married life taught them how to use it, unlocking the treasuries of real home love and mutual helpfulness, which the poorest may possess, and the richest cannot buy. This is the sort of shelf on which young wives and mothers may consent to be laid, safe from the restless fret and fever of the world, finding loyal lovers in the little sons and daughters who cling to them, undaunted by sorrow, poverty, or age, walking side by side, through fair and stormy weather, with a faithful friend, who is, in the true sense of the good old Saxon word, the 'house-band,' and learning, as Meg learned, that a woman's happiest kingdom is home, her highest honor the art of ruling it not as a queen, but as a wise wife and mother. — Louisa May Alcott

This Old House Quotes By Jack Kerouac

When all of the family was stilled in sleep, when the streetlamp a few paces from the house shone at night and made grotesque shadows of the trees upon the house, when the river sighed off into the darkness, when the trains hooted on their way to Montreal far upriver, when the winds swished in the soft treeleaves and something knocked and rattled on the old barn, you could stand in the road and look at this home and know that there is nothing more haunting than a house at night when the family is asleep, something strangely tragic, something beautiful forever. — Jack Kerouac

This Old House Quotes By Cheryl Strayed

My family didn't go to church. Once when I slept over at the house of a friend, her parents brought me to Sunday school with her. I was given this little pamphlet of tiny poems about the natural world, about butterflies and sunsets. My 7-year-old self was so astounded by how these few words were creating pictures and feelings in me. — Cheryl Strayed

This Old House Quotes By Adam Clarke

I am an old man, and I here declare that I never knew them to be productive of any good in the worship of God, and have reason to believe that they are productive of much evil. Music as a science I esteem and admire, but instrumental music in the house of God I abominate and abhor. This is the abuse of music, and I here register my protest against all such corruption of the worship of the author of Christianity. — Adam Clarke

This Old House Quotes By May Sarton

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my "real" life again at last. That is what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and "the house and I resume old conversations". — May Sarton

This Old House Quotes By William Shakespeare

You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand, such as i am. Though for myself alone I would not be ambitious in my wish to wish myself much better, yet for you I would be trebled twenty times myself, a thousand times more rich, that only to stand high in your accunt I might in virtues, beauties, livings, friends, exceed account. But the full sum of me is sum of something, which, to term in gross, is an unlessoned girl, unschooled, unpracticed; happy in this, she is not yet so old but she may learn; happier than this, she is not bred so dull but she can learn; happiest of all, is that her gentle spirit commits itself to yours to be idrected as from her lord, her governor, her king. Myself, and what is mine, to you and yours is now converted. But now I was the lord of this fair mansion, master of my servants, queen o'er myself; and even now, but now, this house, these servants, and this same myself are yours, my lord's. I give them. — William Shakespeare

This Old House Quotes By K.J. Charles

There is something very old and odd and quite unpleasant about this house."
"Yes, its Graham."
Stephan grinned and followed him into the long room. — K.J. Charles

This Old House Quotes By J.P. Delaney

In my art history degree course, we did a module on palimpsests - medieval sheets of parchment so costly that, once the text was no longer needed, the sheets were simply scraped clean and reused, leaving the old writing faintly visible through the new. Later, Renaissance artists used the word pentimenti, repentances, to describe mistakes or alterations that were covered with new paint, only to be revealed years or even centuries later as the paint thinned with time, leaving both the original and the revision on view.

Sometimes I have a sense that this house - our relationship in it, with it, with each other - is like a palimpsest or pentimento, that however much we try to overpaint Emma Matthews, she keeps tiptoeing back: a faint image, an enigmatic smile, stealing its way into the corner of the frame. — J.P. Delaney

This Old House Quotes By Merle Haggard

When I grew up there wasn't air-conditioning or anything of that nature, and this old car had a wall thickness of about ten inches. So we had a little warmer house in the winter and a little cooler in the summer. — Merle Haggard

This Old House Quotes By Susan Wiggs

her home; it just happened to be where she lived. This was the House that Jack Built, she thought, hearing the singsong rhythm of the old children's story in her head. And this was the wife who lived in the house that Jack built. And there was the mistress that screwed the husband that ignored the wife who lived in the house that Jack built.... — Susan Wiggs

This Old House Quotes By Sarah Addison Allen

Currently, the scent of rising dough and hot berries was being sucked through the old air-conditioning unit and spread throughout the main house. This was Lisette's rebellion. She was cooking for guests who weren't coming. It was as if nothing bad could happen if she just kept going. Like a wheel in motion, she seemed to think no one could stop her, or make her leave, once she started. — Sarah Addison Allen

This Old House Quotes By L. H. Cosway

Could you bring me to Rita's house before we go to the airport?" I ask. "There's one last thing I need to ask her to do." "That is on the other side of the river," says Ethan."I know. But I need to see her. Please, I'll be eternally grateful." He doesn't say anything, but instead puts the car in gear and starts the engine. After we are driving for about two minutes he asks. "How grateful?" Ah, I see the old Ethan hasn't disappeared then. I smile and lean over to place a light peck on his cheek. "This grateful," I say to him."Hmm, I think you can do better than that," he chides in good humor.
"You're driving," is all I say in reply.
"I can pull over," he answers smartly. — L. H. Cosway

This Old House Quotes By Anton Chekhov

In the big house opposite someone was playing the piano at Dolzhikov's. It was beginning to get dark, and stars were twinkling in the sky. Here my father, in an old top-hat with wide upturned brim, walked slowly by with my sister on his arm, bowing in response to greetings.
"Look up," he said to my sister, pointing to the sky with the same umbrella with which he had beaten me that afternoon. "Look up at the sky! Even the tiniest stars are all worlds! How insignificant is man in comparison with the universe!"
And he said this in a tone that suggested that it was particularly agreeable and flattering to him that he was so insignificant. How absolutely devoid of talent and imagination he was! — Anton Chekhov

This Old House Quotes By F Scott Fitzgerald

There are times when you almost tell the harmless old lady next door what you really think of her face - that it ought to be on a night-nurse in a house for the blind; when you'd like to ask the man you've been waiting ten minutes for if he isn't all overheated from racing the postman down the block; when you nearly say to the waiter that if they deducted a cent from the bill for every degree the soup was below tepid the hotel would owe you half a dollar; when - and this is the infallible earmark of true exasperation - a smile affects you as an oil-baron's undershirt affects a cow's husband.
But the moment passes. Scars may remain on your dog or your collar or your telephone receiver, but your soul has slid gently back into its place between the lower edge of your heart and the upper edge of your stomach, and all is at peace. — F Scott Fitzgerald

This Old House Quotes By Truman Capote

house and our'n. That old barn 'ud soak up a lotta racket 'fore it reached us. And did you ever think of this? Him that done it, he must've knowed we wouldn't hear. Else he wouldn't have took the chance - shootin' off a shotgun four times in the middle of the night! Why, he'd be crazy. Course, you might say he must be crazy anyhow. To go doing what he did. But my opinion, him that done it had it figured out to the final T. He knowed. And there's one thing I know, too. Me and the Missis, — Truman Capote

This Old House Quotes By Kathryn Stockett

THE HOUSE straightened up and then go on and fix some of that chicken salad now, say Miss Leefolt. It's bridge club day. Every fourth Wednesday a the month. A course I already got everthing ready to go - made the chicken salad this morning, ironed the tablecloths yesterday. Miss Leefolt seen me at it too. She ain't but twenty-three years old and she like hearing herself tell me what to do. She already got the blue dress on I ironed this morning, the one with sixty-five pleats on the waist, so tiny I got to squint through my glasses to iron. I don't hate much in life, — Kathryn Stockett

This Old House Quotes By Jean Rhys

....one of those long, romantic novels, six hundred and fifty pages of small print, translated from French or German or Hungarian or something -- because few of the English ones have the exact feeling I mean. And you read one page of it or even one phrase of it, and then you gobble up all the rest and go about in a dream for weeks afterwards, for months afterwards -- perhaps all your life, who knows? -- surrounded by those six hundred and fifty pages, the houses, the streets, the snow, the river, the roses, the girls, the sun, the ladies' dresses and the gentlemen's voices, the old, wicked, hard-hearted women and the old, sad women, the waltz music -- everything. What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head. 'The house I was living in when I read that book,' you think, or 'This colour reminds me of that book. — Jean Rhys

This Old House Quotes By Tomas Transtromer

A Place in the Forest On the way there a pair of startled wings clattered up, that was all. You go there alone. There is a tall building which consists entirely of cracks, a building which is perpetually tottering but can never collapse. The thousand-fold sun floats in through the cracks. In this play of light an inverted law of gravity prevails: the house is anchored in the sky and whatever falls, falls upwards. You can turn round there. There you are allowed to grieve. You can dare to see certain old truths which are otherwise kept packed, in storage. The roles I have, deep down, float up there, hang like the dried skulls in the ancestral cabin on some out-of-the-way Melanesian islet. A childlike aura round the gruesome trophies. So mild it is, in the forest. — Tomas Transtromer

This Old House Quotes By Louis C.K.

My 13-year-old daughter leaves the house at 7:15 every morning and takes a smelly city bus to school way uptown. It's like 8 degrees out, and it's dark and she's got this morning face and I send her out there to take a bus. Meanwhile, my driver is sitting in a toasty Mercedes that's going to take me to work once both kids are gone. I could send her in the Mercedes and then have it come back to get me, but I can't have my kid doing that. I can't do that to her. Me? I earned that f - ing Mercedes. You better f - ing believe it. — Louis C.K.

This Old House Quotes By Ed Harris

I havent even been drinking, but, at all, but, you know, being a man, Ive got to say that weve got this guy in the White House who thinks he is a man, you know, who projects himself as a man because he has a certain masculinity, and he's a good old boy, and he used to drink, and he knows how to shoot a gun and how to drive a pickup truck, etcetera like that. Thats not the definition of a man, God Dammit! — Ed Harris

This Old House Quotes By Lois Lowry

JONAS RECEIVER OF MEMORY Go immediately at the end of school hours each day to the Annex entrance behind the House of the Old and present yourself to the attendant. Go immediately to your dwelling at the conclusion of Training Hours each day. From this moment you are exempted from rules governing rudeness. You may ask any question of any citizen and you will receive answers. Do not discuss your training with any other member of the community, including parents and Elders. From this moment you are prohibited from dream-telling. Except for illness or injury unrelated to your training, do not apply for any medication. You are not permitted to apply for release. You may lie. — Lois Lowry

This Old House Quotes By Khloe Kardashian

I bought Justin Bieber's house ... He had, like, this nook under the stairs which I didn't need, so I covered it up. When I ran into him, he was like 'What did you do with the nook? I used to go in there and play video games.' When I told him it was gone, he was so upset. I didn't think this 20-year-old boy would even care! — Khloe Kardashian

This Old House Quotes By Ronald Reagan

Read this morning of a black family - husband and wife both work in govt. printing office. They live in a nice house near U. of Maryland. They have been harassed and even had a cross burned on their lawn. It was all on the front page of the "Post." I told Mike & Jim I'd like to call on them. We cleared the last part of the afternoon schedule & Nancy & I went calling. They were a very nice couple with a 4 year old daughter - grandma (a most gracious lady) lived with them. Their home was very nice & tastefully furnished. They were very nice about our coming & expressed their thanks. The whole neighborhood was lining the street - most of them cheering and applauding us. I hope we did some good. There is no place in this land for the hate-mongers & bigots. — Ronald Reagan

This Old House Quotes By Bill Maher

I always wanted to be a comedian, even when I was a little kid. I had a funny father who was in the news business, by the way. He was a radio news guy. So the news was always in my house, and funny was always in my house. It was sort of just baked into the DNA that I would do this for a living, but I can remember being less than 10 years old and dreaming about being a comedian. — Bill Maher

This Old House Quotes By Marcel Proust

My aunt must have been perfectly well aware that she would not see Swann again, that she would never leave her own house any more, but this ultimate seclusion seemed to be accepted by her with all the more readiness for the very reason which, to our minds, ought to have made it more unbearable; namely, that such a seclusion was forced upon her by the gradual and steady diminution in her strength which she was able to measure daily, which, by making every action, every movement 'tiring' to her if not actually painful, gave to inaction, isolation and silence the blessed, strengthening and refreshing charm of repose. — Marcel Proust

This Old House Quotes By William Faulkner

Because you know that's all I needs, all I wants, is for you to try to run, to turn your back on me and run. I know you aint going to. Because all you got to beat is me. I got to beat old Carothers. Get your pistol."
"No," the other said. "Go home. Get out of here. Tonight I will come to your house
"
"After this?" Lucas said. "Me and you, in the same country, breathing the same air even? No matter what you could say, what you could even prove so I would have to believe it, after this? Get your pistol. — William Faulkner

This Old House Quotes By Steve Martin

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA: WHY IT'S A BAD TITLE
I admit that "Love in the time of ... " is a great title, up to a point. You're reading along, you're happy, it's about love. I like the way the word time comes in - a nice, nice feeling. Then the morbid Cholera appears. I was happy till then. Why not "Love in the Time of the Blue, Blue, Bluebirds"? "Love in the Time of Oozing Sores and Pustules" is probably an earlier title the author used as he was writing in a rat-infested tree house on an old Smith Corona. This writer, whoever he is, could have used a couple of weeks in Pacific Daylight Time. — Steve Martin

This Old House Quotes By Susan Meissner

Thistle House is for people who love and care for one another. We respect one another in this house, Emmeline. We carry one another's burdens. We weep for one another and we laugh with one another. We hold one another by the hand when the lights go out and when the way seems hopeless. We work together and we share the table together and we pray together. No matter how old we are or what we are called. — Susan Meissner

This Old House Quotes By Caroline Mitchell

In Haven, old houses didn't settle. They carried a life of their own, and Blackwater farm was no exception. This was a house that would never be a home. The best they could hope for would be to co-exist with the ghosts of the past.
- The Silent Twin — Caroline Mitchell

This Old House Quotes By Rose George

It drips on her head most days, says Champaben, but in the monsoon season it's worse. In rain, worms multiply. Every day, nonetheless, she gets up and walks to her owners' house, and there she picks up their excrement with her bare hands or a piece of tin, scrapes it into a basket, puts the basket on her head or shoulders, and carries it to the nearest waste dump. She has no mask, no gloves, and no protection. She is paid a pittance if she gets paid at all. She regularly gets dysentary, giardia, brain fever. She does this because a 3,000-year-old social hierarchy says she has to. — Rose George

This Old House Quotes By Susanna Clarke

Houses, like people, are apt to become rather eccentric if left too much on their own; this house was the architectural equivalent of an old gentleman in a worn dressing-gown and torn slippers, who got up and went to bed at odd times of day, and who kept up a continual conversation with friends no one else could see. — Susanna Clarke

This Old House Quotes By Nathaniel Hawthorne

This was a freedom essential to the health even of a character so little susceptible of morbid influences as that of Phoebe. The old house [with dry rot in its structure and perhaps also in its inhabitants]; ... it was not good to breathe no other atmosphere that that. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

This Old House Quotes By Dee Hock

We don't have to remain in this radically destructive mind-set and institutional-set. We can change, and the natural order of things could emerge in all of our societal organizations-government, commerce, religion-it's right there, waiting to happen. I often tell people that every mind is like a room in an old house, stuffed with very old furniture. Take any space in your mind and empty it of your old conceptions and new ones will rush in, good or bad. So change is more a getting rid of rather than an adding to or an acquiring. — Dee Hock

This Old House Quotes By Tony Hendra

People are always changing themselves and their world, dear. Very few of the changes are new. We rather confuse change and newness, I think. What is truly new never changes."

"You speak in riddles, aged progenitor."

"The world worships a certain kind of newness. People are always talking about a new car, or a new drink or p-p-play or house, but these things are not truly new, are they? They begin to get old the minute you acquire them. New is not in things. New is within us. The truly new is something that is new forever: you. Every morning of your life and every evening, every moment is new. You have never lived this moment before and you never will again. In this sense the new is also the eternal. — Tony Hendra

This Old House Quotes By Herman Melville

And even as this old guide-book boasts of the, to us, insignificant Liverpool of fifty years ago, the New York guidebooks are now vaunting of the magnitude of a town, whose future inhabitants, multitudinous as the pebbles on the beach, and girdled in with high walls and towers, flanking endless avenues of opulence and taste, will regard all our Broadways and Bowerys as but the paltry nucleus to their Nineveh. From far up the Hudson, beyond Harlem River where the young saplings are now growing, that will overarch their lordly mansions with broad boughs, centuries old; they may send forth explorers to penetrate into the then obscure and smoky alleys of the Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street; and going still farther south, may exhume the present Doric Custom-house, and quote it as a proof that their high and mighty metropolis enjoyed a Hellenic antiquity. — Herman Melville

This Old House Quotes By John Francis Daley

Ever since I was 7 years old, I was writing. I remember being in the basement of my house, this dank, horrible basement, putting on plays with not-very-willing participants, and I would promise kids in the neighborhood that I'd play Nintendo 64 with them after we'd rehearse this stupid play that I wrote. — John Francis Daley

This Old House Quotes By Karen Marie Moning

That's what you're after? Establishing new case
precedence? Never going to happen. Not on this point. You
want to turn Dani. Assuming she's ever Dani again."
"Nobody's turning my fucking honey," Lor muttered
darkly.
"You took the Highlander, as your test case," Barrons
said.
Ryodan said nothing.
"Kas doesn't speak. X is half mad on a good day,
bugfuck crazy on a bad one. You're tired of it. You want your
family back. You want a full house, like the old days. — Karen Marie Moning

This Old House Quotes By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it - low, vulgar, meddling with everything, assuming universal competency, and flattering every base passion - and sneering at everything noble refined and truly national. The direct tyranny will come on by and by, after it shall have gratified the multitude with the spoil and ruin of the old institutions of the land. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This Old House Quotes By Arthur Conan Doyle

Three centuries had flowed past the old Manor House, centuries of births and of homecomings, of country dances and of the meetings of fox hunters. Strange that now in its old age this dark business should have cast its shadow upon the venerable walls! And yet those strange, peaked roofs and quaint, overhung gables were a fitting covering to grim and terrible intrigue. As I looked at the deep-set windows and the long sweep of the dull-coloured, water-lapped front, I felt that no more fitting scene could be set for such a tragedy. — Arthur Conan Doyle

This Old House Quotes By Charles Dickens

This present summer evening, as the sun goes down, the preparations are complete. Dreary and solemn the old house looks, with so many appliances of habitation and with no inhabitants except the pictured forms upon the walls. So did these come and go, a Dedlock in possession might have ruminated passing along; so did they see this gallery hushed and quiet, as I see it now; so think, as I think, of the gap that they would make in this domain when they were gone; so find it, as I find it, difficult to believe that it could be without them; so pass from my world, as I pass from theirs, now closing the reverberating door; so leave no blank to miss them, and so die. — Charles Dickens

This Old House Quotes By Ilona Andrews

When alone in a dark forest waiting for an audience with an evil god, the most prudent course of action is to be quiet and wait. 'Prudent' wasn't one of my favourite words.
"Hello? I've come to borrow a cup of sugar. Anybody? Perhaps there is an old woman with a house made of candy who could help me?"
"Marrying for love isn't wise."
The voice came from somewhere to the left. Melodious, but not soft, definitely female and charged with a promise of hidden power. Something told me that hearing her scream would end very badly for me.
I stopped and pivoted toward the voice.
"Marry for safety. Marry for power. But only fools marry for love."
When a strange voice talks to you in the black woods, only idiots answer.
I was that idiot. "Thank you, counsellor. How much do I owe you for this session? — Ilona Andrews

This Old House Quotes By Charles Ollier

Hang care!' exclaimed he. 'This is, a delicious evening; the wine has a finer relish here than in the house, and the song is more exciting and melodious under the tranquil sky than in the close room, where sound is stifled. Come, let us have a bacchanalian chant - let us, with old Sir Toby, make the welkin dance, and rouse the night-owl with a catch. I am right merry. Pass the bottle, and tune your voices - a catch, a catch! The lights will be here anon.'

("The Haunted House Of Paddington") — Charles Ollier

This Old House Quotes By Thorton Wilder

I suppose it seems ignoble to you that a great oak of a man should go about the world like a blind man about an empty house merely because a chit of a girl has been withdrawn from it. No, no, you cannot understand this, my adored one, but I understand and grow pale ... You will laugh at me, but I think he goes about the hemispheres to pass the time between now and his old age. — Thorton Wilder

This Old House Quotes By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Burn, O evening hearth, and waken Pleasant visions, as of old! Though the house by winds be shaken, Safe I keep this room of gold! — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

This Old House Quotes By Bucky Sinister

They got drunk and high on a regular basis, but this is a vestige of youth that you either quit while you're young or you become an addict if you don't die.
If you are the Old Guy In The Punk House, move out. You have a substance abuse problem. — Bucky Sinister

This Old House Quotes By Jessica Scott

Your father is going to be quite interested in this little tale. Does he know where you are right now?"
"None of your business, gramps," the kid sneered.
Gale briefly wondered how long the prison sentence would be for throwing a sixteen-year-old walking hard-on down the stairs of his ex-wife's house. — Jessica Scott

This Old House Quotes By Haruki Murakami

After she had gone through most of the songs she knew, she sang an old one that she said she had written herself. I'd love to cook a stew for you But I have no pot. I'd love to knit a scarf for you But I have no wool. I'd love to write a poem for you But I have no pen. "It's called 'I Have Nothing,'" Midori announced. It was a truly terrible song, both words and music. I listened to this musical mess with thoughts of how the house would blow apart in the explosion if the gas station caught fire. Tired of singing, Midori put her guitar down and slumped against my shoulder like a cat in the sun. "How did you like my song?" she asked. I answered cautiously, "It was unique and original and very expressive of your personality." "Thanks," she said. "The theme is that I have nothing." "Yeah, I kinda thought so. — Haruki Murakami

This Old House Quotes By Jim Gaffigan

I never understood those commercials with the parents celebrating the end of summer. Now I understand that around mid-August, all the summer camps are over and you've run out of constructive things to do with your kid and you are desperate to get them out of the house. You've grown tired of your four-year-old pointing to words and asking, "What does this say?" Apparently it's not okay to respond to them with, "It says, 'Learn how to read.' " You don't want to get rid of your children, but you do want to get rid of them for a couple of hours a day. School seems like a perfect solution. Your precious child will learn something, and most important, you will be able to use the bathroom in peace. — Jim Gaffigan

This Old House Quotes By Wilkie Collins

You may scold your carpenter, when he has made a bad table, though you can't make a table yourself.' I say to you - 'Mr. Finch, you may point out a defect in a baby's petticoats, though you haven't got a baby yourself!' Doesn't that satisfy you? All right! Take another illustration. Look at your room here. I can see in the twinkling of an eye, that it's badly lit. You have only got one window - you ought to have two. Is it necessary to be a practical builder to discover that? Absurd! Are you satisfied now? No! Take another illustration. What's this printed paper, here, on the chimney-piece? Assessed Taxes. Ha! Assessed Taxes will do. You're not in the House of Commons; you're not a Chancellor of the Exchequer - but haven't you an opinion of your own about taxation, in spite of that? Must you and I be in Parliament before we can presume to see that the feeble old British Constitution is at its last gasp? — Wilkie Collins

This Old House Quotes By Penelope Fitzgerald

In 1959 Florence Green occasionally passed a night when she was not absolutely sure whether she had slept or not. This was because of her worries as to whether to purchase a small property, the Old House, with its own warehouse on the foreshore, and to open the only bookshop in Hardborough. The uncertainty probably kept her awake. She had once seen a heron flying across the estuary and trying, while it was on the wing, to swallow an eel which it had caught. The eel, in turn, was struggling to escape from the gullet of the heron and appeared a quarter, a half, or occasionally three-quarters of the way out. The indecision expressed by both creatures was pitiable. They had taken on too much. Florence felt that if she hadn't slept at all - and people often say this when they mean nothing of the kind - she must have been kept awake by thinking of the heron. — Penelope Fitzgerald

This Old House Quotes By Marilynne Robinson

This morning a splendid dawn passed over our house on its way to Kansas. This morning Kansas rolled out of its sleep into a sunlight grandly announced, proclaimed throughout heaven - one more of the very finite number of days that this old prairie has been called Kansas, or Iowa. But it has all been one day, that first day. Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning. — Marilynne Robinson

This Old House Quotes By Jacqueline Winspear

And you think journeying abroad will give you this knowledge you crave?
I think it will contribute to my understanding of the world, of people.
More so than say, the old lady who has lived in the same house her entire life, who has borne children both alive and dead? Who tends her soil; who sees the sun shine and the rain fall over the land, winter, spring, summer and autumn? What might you say to the idea that we all have a capacity for wisdom, just as a jug has room for a finite amount of water-pouring more water in the jug doesn't increase that capacity. — Jacqueline Winspear

This Old House Quotes By Ray Bradbury

He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend's house, a two-year-old child building word patters, like jargon, making pretty sounds in the air. — Ray Bradbury

This Old House Quotes By Al Madrigal

My daughter, who is 7 years old - I have no idea where she learned this - she made a video where she's beat-boxing. We have no idea where the beat-boxing came from, but all of a sudden, there it was. Now we're launched into lyric sheets for every single song that is current. They're all over our house. — Al Madrigal

This Old House Quotes By Haruki Murakami

A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world. Alone in this fun house, only I grow old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me. Yet even as I sleep somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, wind-up birds everywhere are busy at work fulfilling their appointed rounds. — Haruki Murakami

This Old House Quotes By David Sedaris

If there'd been anything decent in the house, anything approaching real ice cream, it would have been eaten long ago. I knew this, so I bypassed the freezer in the kitchen and the secondary freezer in the toolshed and went to the neglected, tundralike one in the basement. Behind the chickens bought years earlier on sale, and the roasts encased like chestnuts in blood-tinted frost, I found a tub of ice milk, vanilla-flavored, and the color of pus. It had been frozen for so long that even I, a child, was made to feel old by the price tag. Thirty-five cents! You can't get naught for that nowadays! — David Sedaris

This Old House Quotes By Michael Weems

This body's the same old house that time has redecorated. — Michael Weems

This Old House Quotes By St John Morris

On the other side of St John's house is a fake egg timer who can't maintain an erection. He shares the property with a glossy beef burger called Tom, who has been painted by a seven year old magistrate in order to be entered for this year's Miss East Lancashire competition. Next door to them is a Dundee cake with a lisp. — St John Morris

This Old House Quotes By Sarah Addison Allen

Mom! Look. This one is my favorite," Devin said, pulling out a faded pink dress with a red plaid sash. The crinoline petticoat underneath was so old and stiff it made snapping sounds, like beads or fire embers. She dropped the dress over her head, over her clothes. It brushed the floor. "When I'm old enough for it to fit me, I'm going to wear it with purple shoes," she said.
"A bold choice," Kate said as Devin dove back into the trunk. The attic in Kate's mother's house had always fascinated Devin with its promise of hidden treasures. When Kate's mother had been alive, she had let Devin eat Baby Ruth candy bars and drink grape soda and play in this old trunk full of dresses that generations of Morris women had worn to try entice rich men to marry them. Most of the clothes had belonged to Kate's grandmother Marilee, a renowned beauty who, like all the rest, had fallen in love with a poor man instead. — Sarah Addison Allen

This Old House Quotes By Miriam Toews

I heard Tash say: Nomi, you're sad man. Get a grip. Walk away. What have I taught you? And I thought: You taught me that some people can leave and some can't and those who can will always be infinitely cooler than those you can't and I'm one of the ones who can't because you're one of the ones who did and there's this old guy in a wool suit sitting in an empty house who has no one but me now thank you very, very, very much. — Miriam Toews

This Old House Quotes By Ann Patchett

His own daughters constantly presented him with a mathematical impossibility, one minute running around the house wearing pajamas covered in images of the blankly staring Hello, Kitty, the next minute announcing they had dates who would be picking them up at seven. He believed his daughters were not old enough to date and yet clearly by the standards of this country they were old enough to be members of a terrorist organization — Ann Patchett

This Old House Quotes By John Connolly

It takes time to get used to a strange house, especially one as old as this. Even I sometimes find myself looking over my shoulder when I'm alone in it. It's the way of such places, isn't it? They wear their history heavily. — John Connolly

This Old House Quotes By Kate Mulgrew

It takes a very long time to sever a marriage in which children are involved. There is a table, two chairs, and a small pile of bargaining chips. This is how it begins, but it ends with one chair in an empty room. The days darken. The children are slices open and split down the middle. Someone takes an arm; someone takes a foot. The car pulling into the driveway on a Friday afternoon becomes a hearse, and everything is couched in lies. The house of old assumes a silence. — Kate Mulgrew

This Old House Quotes By Henry James

She had been looking all round her again - at the lawn, the great trees, the reedy, silvery Thames, the beautiful old house; and while engaged in this survey she had made room in it for her companions; a comprehensiveness of observation easily conceivable on the part of a young woman who was evidently both intelligent and excited. She had seated herself and had put away the little dog; her white hands, in her lap, were folded upon her black dress; her head was erect, her eye lighted, her flexible figure turned itself easily this way and that, in sympathy with the alertness with which she evidently caught impressions. Her impressions were numerous, and they were all reflected in a clear, still smile. I've never seen anything so beautiful as this. — Henry James

This Old House Quotes By Daphne Du Maurier

She had to live in this bright, red gabled house with the nurse until it was time for her to die ... I thought how little we know about the feelings of old people. Children we understand, their fears and hopes and make-believe. — Daphne Du Maurier

This Old House Quotes By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

For years it seemed to me that this period had become a recurrent nightmare that I had almost every night, because I would wake in the morning feeling the same terror I had felt in the room with the saint. During my adolescence, when I was a student at an icy boarding school in the Andes, I would wake up crying in the middle of the night. I needed old age without remorse to understand that the misfortune of my grandparents in the house in Catasa was that they were always mired in their nostalgic memories, and the more they insisted on conjuring them, the deper they sank. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This Old House Quotes By Kahlil Gibran

And an old priest said, Speak to us of Religion.
And he said:
Who can separate his faith from his actions?
Who can spread his hours before him, saying, "This for God and this for myself; This for my soul, and this other for my body?" ...
He who wears his morality but as his best garment were better naked ...
And he to whom worshiping is a window, to open but also to shut, has not yet visited the house of his soul ... — Kahlil Gibran

This Old House Quotes By Alice Taylor

Later that day I went back to the old turf-house door and drew back the ivy. There between the stones was the dried-out bird's nest that was no longer in use because its owner was on her foreign holidays. I eased my letter to Santa out of my pocket and tucked it into the nest. I considered this the ideal resting place because the owner and Santa both belonged to foreign places and came here across the sky. There was the mystery of the unknown about the worlds they both came from; they belonged in the sky and my letter was destined to join them there when the time was right. — Alice Taylor

This Old House Quotes By Feist

I'm in the countryside outside of Paris, in a beautiful old manor house. The studio is in the basement, but we decided to set everything up in the old parlor and dining-room area so we can look at each other and (at) the sunshine coming through the stained-glass windows. It's pretty idyllic, and I think it's spoiling me. I'll have to go back to regular life after this. — Feist

This Old House Quotes By Kevin Hearne

We saw Leif to the door and wished him farewell. Time to hit the hay for the last time in this old house, I told my hound as I closed the door on the vampire. All right, buddy. What'll it be? — Kevin Hearne

This Old House Quotes By Stasi Eldredge

When God creates Eve, he calls her an ezer kenegdo. 'It is not good for the man to be alone, I shall make him [an ezer kenegdo]' (Gen. 2:18 Alter). Hebrew scholar Robert Alter, who has spent years translating the book of Genesis, says that this phrase is 'notoriously difficult to translate.' The various attempts we have in English are "helper" or "companion" or the notorious "help meet." Why are these translations so incredibly wimpy, boring, flat ... disappointing? What is a help meet, anyway? What little girl dances through the house singing "One day I shall be a help meet?" Companion? A dog can be a companion. Helper? Sounds like Hamburger Helper. Alter is getting close when he translates it "sustainer beside him"
The word ezer is used only twenty other places in the entire Old Testament. And in every other instance the person being described is God himself, when you need him to come through for you desperately. — Stasi Eldredge

This Old House Quotes By John Prine

If dreams were thunder and lightning was desire this old house would have burned down a long time ago — John Prine

This Old House Quotes By Martha Stewart

I live in the same house I've lived in for 25 years. I haven't gone off and bought mansions. Even though my subject is living, living in a mansion wouldn't do for my readers. I have to keep my credibility alive with my readers, so we're in the same place. I just make that place nicer and nicer. And that's a secret. People don't know that. People think, oh, she lives in this fabulous place, but it's the same old place. It started out like a farm, it got to be a farmette, then it got to be an estatelet. I built a wall; it helped a lot. But it's the same place, the same grounded nature. — Martha Stewart

This Old House Quotes By Ian Fleming

In the centre of Bond was a hurricane-room, the kind of citadel found in old-fashioned houses in the tropics. These rooms are small, strongly built cells in the heart of the house, in the middle of the ground floor and sometimes dug down into its foundations. To this cell the owner and his family retire if the storm threatens to destroy the house, and they stay there until the danger is past. Bond went to his hurricane room only when the situation was beyond his control and no other possible action could be taken. Now he retired to this citadel, closed his mind to the hell of noise and violent movement, and focused on a single stitch in the back of the seat in front of him, waiting with slackened nerves for whatever fate had decided for B. E. A. Flight No. 130. — Ian Fleming

This Old House Quotes By Ray Bradbury

And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beating and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for their are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior: official censors, judges and executors. That's you, Montag, and that's me. — Ray Bradbury

This Old House Quotes By Gregory Of Nazianzus

When one has looked upon Jesus, though he be of little stature like Zacchaeus of old (cf. Lk. 19:3), and climb up on the top of the sycamore tree by mortifying his members which are upon the earth (cf. Col. 3:5), and having risen above the body of humiliation, then he shall receive the Word, and it shall be said to him, This day has salvation come to this house (cf. Lk. 19:9). Then let him lay hold on the salvation, and bring forth fruit more perfectly, scattering and pouring forth rightly that which as a publican he wrongly gathered. — Gregory Of Nazianzus

This Old House Quotes By Azar Nafisi

You ask me what it means to be irrelevant? The feeling is akin to visiting your old house as a wandering ghost with unfinished business. Imagine going back: the structure is familiar ,but the door is now metal instead of wood,the walls have been painted a garish pink ,the easy chair you loved so much is gone .Your office is now the family room and your beloved bookcases have been replaced by a brand-new television set . This is your house,and it is not. And you are no longer relevant to this house , to its walls and doors and floors ; you are not seen . — Azar Nafisi

This Old House Quotes By G.R. Reader

No, I have never had a problem finding books to read. But I have had a problem finding people who understand what it's like to really LOVE reading. Maybe even need it. People who associate periods of their life with the kinds of things they were reading then, whether in school or in dusty old rooms of a house in Holland. The kind of people who take personal journeys into books and write responses that are part review, part stories in themselves. This is what Goodreads has always given me. — G.R. Reader

This Old House Quotes By Bijou Hunter

I really don't want to leave this house," she murmurs. "I know that feeling." "It's not healthy." "And your old life was? Healthy doesn't mean shit. Happiness should be our goal. Are you happy here? — Bijou Hunter

This Old House Quotes By Josephine Humphreys

Growing up in an old city, you learn history's one true lesson: that history fades. Nothing sticks together for very long without immense effort. His own strong house is in a constant process of disintegration. He calls workmen to come repair the roof, paint the porches, replace sills; but even this work has no permanence, it will have to be done again in four or five years. Is this noble activity for a man? Patching, gluing, temporizing, begging for time? — Josephine Humphreys

This Old House Quotes By Nadeem Aslam

We walk past the house with the blue door. It has been made clear to us that we are to walk quietly by this house, never accept an invitation to step inside, never return the smile of the woman of the house, nor glance at the old man who sometimes looks out of the upstairs window; at our peril are we to be tempted by the flowers lying under the eaves, or by the figs that the storms shake loose. But our shadows dare each other. One of them is foolish enough to climb on to the doorstep but is pulled away just before it can reach the door bell. — Nadeem Aslam

This Old House Quotes By Ajahn Chah

With mindfulness you can see the real owner of things. Do you think this is your world, your body? It is the world's world, the body's body. If you tell it, Don't get old, does the body listen? Does your stomach ask permission to get sick? We only rent this house; why not find out who really owns it? — Ajahn Chah

This Old House Quotes By Mark Twain

Now the way that the book winds up is this: Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich. We got six thousand dollars apiece - all gold. It was an awful sight of money when it was piled up. Well, Judge Thatcher he took it and put it out at interest, and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece all the year round - more than a body could tell what to do with. The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn't stand it no longer I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied. But Tom Sawyer he hunted me up and said he was going to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would go back to the widow and be respectable. So I went back. — Mark Twain

This Old House Quotes By Sonja Condit

These houses were thirty, forty years old. People must have died, had babies, gotten engaged, married, divorced, hurt each other in a thousand ways, reconciled and forgiven, passionately hated and desperately loved; if you abandoned a house whenever something significant happened, people would live in tents. This house had known life. — Sonja Condit

This Old House Quotes By Alice Sebold

And in a small house five miles away was a man who held my mud-encrusted charm bracelet out to his wife.
Look what I found at the old industrial park," he said. "A construction guy said they were bulldozing the whole lot. They're afraid of sink holes like that one that swallowed the cars."
His wife poured him some water from the sink as he fingered the tiny bike and the ballet shoe, the flower basket and the thimble. He held out the muddy bracelet as she set down his glass.
This little girl's grown up by now," she said.
Almost. Not quite.
I wish you all a long and happy life. — Alice Sebold

This Old House Quotes By F Scott Fitzgerald

It's just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they've made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty. — F Scott Fitzgerald

This Old House Quotes By Sebastian Junger

The story about Bessie Goldberg that I heard from my parents was that a nice old lady had been killed down the street and an innocent black man went to prison for the crime. Meanwhile
unknown to anyone
a violent psychopath named Al was working alone at our house all day and probably committed the murder. In our family this story eventually acquired the tidy symbolism of a folk tale. Roy Smith was a stand-in for everything that was decent but utterly defenseless. Albert DeSalvo, of course, was a stand-in for pure random evil. — Sebastian Junger

This Old House Quotes By J.K. Rowling

Oh, no, sir, no,' said Dobby, looking suddenly serious. 'Tis part of the house-elf's enslavement, sir. We keeps their secrets and our silence, sir, we upholds the family's honour, and we never speaks ill of them - though Professor Dumbledore told Dobby he does not insist upon this. Professor Dumbledore said we is free to - to' Dobby looked suddenly nervous, and beckoned Harry closer. Harry bent forwards. Dobby whispered, 'He said we is free to call him a - a barmy old codger if we likes, sir!' Dobby gave a frightened sort of giggle. — J.K. Rowling

This Old House Quotes By Lewis Carroll

Fury said to a mouse
that he met in the house
let us both go to law; I will prosecute you
let there be no denial; come, we must have a trial
for really, this morning, I've nothing to do
such a trial, dear sir,
said the mouse to the cur
without jury or judge
would be wasting our breath
I'll be judge, I'll be jury
said cunning old fury
I'll try the whole cause and condemn you
to death — Lewis Carroll

This Old House Quotes By D.L. Moody

SOME day you will read in the papers that D. L. Moody, of East Northfield, is dead. Don't you believe a word of it! At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now. I shall have gone up higher, that is all; gone out of this old clay tenement into a house that is immortal, a body that death cannot touch, that sin cannot taint, a body like unto His own glorious body. I was born of the flesh in 1837. I was born of the Spirit in 1856. That which is born of the flesh may die. That which is born of the Spirit will live forever. — D.L. Moody

This Old House Quotes By T.E. Lawrence

The Howeitat spread out along the cliffs to return the peasants' fire. This manner of going displeased Auda, the old lion, who raged that a mercenary village folk should dare to resist their secular masters, the Abu Tayi. So he jerked his halter, cantered his mare down the path, and rode out plain to view beneath the easternmost houses of the village. There he reined in, and shook a hand at them, booming in his wonderful voice: 'Dogs, do you not know Auda?' When they realized it was that implacable son of war their hearts failed them, and an hour later Sherif Nasir in the town-house was sipping tea with his guest the Turkish Governor, trying to console him for the sudden change of fortune. — T.E. Lawrence

This Old House Quotes By Alephonsion Deng

He'd say, "If my mother was here, I wouldn't be like this." We'd say, "Shut up boy, you're not in your mama's house no more." We said that a lot. As children, seven or eight years old, we know nothing about the world, just that we were not in mama's house no more. — Alephonsion Deng

This Old House Quotes By Marilynne Robinson

324This morning a splendid dawn passed over our house on its way to Kansas. This morning Kansas rolled out its sleep into a sunlight grandly announced, proclaimed throughout heaven--one more of the very finite number of days that this old prairie has been called Kansas, or Iowa. But it has all been one day, that first day. Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning. My grandfather's grave turned into the light, and the dew on his weedy little mortality patch was glorious — Marilynne Robinson

This Old House Quotes By Ray Bradbury

Until they stood at last by a crumbling wall, looking up and up and still farther up at the great tombyard top of the old house. For that's what it seemed. The high mountain peak of the mansion was littered with what looked like black bones or iron rods, and enough chimneys to choke out smoke signals from three dozen fires on sooty hearths hidden far below in dim bowels of this monster place. With so many chimneys, the roof seemed a vast cemetery, each chimney signifying the burial place of some old god of fire or enchantress of steam, smoke, and firefly spark. even as they watched, a kind of bleak exhalation of soot breathed up out of some four dozen flues, darkening the sky still more, and putting out some few stars. — Ray Bradbury

This Old House Quotes By Lisa Kleypas

Why do old houses creak so much?" he asked idly, playing with her braid and drawing the silky end across her cheek.
"When all the warmth fades at night, it makes the old boards contract and slip against each other."
"A bloody massive house, it is. And you were left to your own devices in this place for too long. I didn't understand before, how alone you were."
"I had the twins for company. I watched over them."
"But there was no one to watch over you."
A sense of uneasiness came over her, as it always did whenever she reflected on her childhood. It had seemed as if her very survival had depended on never complaining or drawing attention to herself. "Oh I- I didn't need that."
"All little girls need to feel safe and wanted. — Lisa Kleypas

This Old House Quotes By Han-shan

Children I implore you
get out of the burning house now
three carts wait outside
to save you from a homeless life
relax in the village square
before the sky everything's empty
no direction is better or worse
east is just as good as west
those who know the meaning of this
are free to go where they want — Han-shan