Quotes & Sayings About Tidiness

Ceony made her way down the hall, peeking briefly into her room. The bed had been remade, and she smiled. Emery's odd knack for tidiness had him folding and tucking blanket corners as though crafting a spell, and while he had demonstrated to Ceony how to properly make a bed, she'd never taken the time to mimic the art. She often kept the door to her room closed just so Emery wouldn't be tempted to rearrange her things, but with her out of the house, there was nothing to stop him.
He must be bored.
She passed her room and stuck her head into the library, but the paper magician wasn't there. The table and telegraph had both been moved to the right of the window, however. Terribly bored, then. — Charlie N. Holmberg

Fear, at its center, is a perceived loss of control. When life spins wildly, we grab for a component of life we can manage: our diet, the tidiness of a house, the armrest of a plane, or, in many cases, people. The more insecure we feel, the meaner we become. — Max Lucado

You know what I like to do on a Sunday morning? Clean my house. I really enjoy it; it's my ritual. I require tidiness, actually. I have to have everything spotless before I can relax. — Jonathan Rhys Meyers

Her tiny and organized handwriting reminded me of the tidiness of her desk, as if she'd wanted to find in words the peace and safety that life hadn't wanted to grant her. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

A taxonomy of abilities, like a taxonomy anywhere else in science, is apt to strike a certain type of impatient student as a gratuitous orgy of pedantry. Doubtless, compulsions to intellectual tidiness express themselves prematurely at times, and excessively at others, but a good descriptive taxonomy, as Darwin found in developing his theory, and as Newton found in the work of Kepler, is the mother of laws and theories. — Raymond Cattell

My tidiness, and my untidiness, are full of regret and remorse and complex feelings. — Natalia Ginzburg

A creative mess is better than idle tidiness. — Michael J. Fox

I am a bit obsessive about tidiness. I need to make my bed in the morning and leave it perfectly made up. — Kiefer Sutherland

Tidiness is a virtue, symmetry is often a constituent of beauty ... — Winston Churchill

Geneva has the sleepy tidiness of a man who combs his hair while yet in his pyjamas. — Lewis Mumford

Tidiness ... makes life easier and more agreeable, does harm to no one and actually saves time and trouble to the person who practices it: there must be an ominous flaw to explain why millions of generations continue to reject it. — Freya Stark

As for Humphrey, he was never renowned for tidiness. "My nature abhors the vacuum," he said. — Tom Rachman

Order and tidiness is the first law of Heaven. — Brunello Cucinelli

My heart tells me to stop right here, to offer quiet benediction and call it the end. But the truth won't allow it. Because there is no end, happy or otherwise. Nothing is fixed, nothing solved. the facts, such as they are, finally spin off into the void of things missing, the inconclusiveness of us. Who are we? Where do we go? The ambiguity may be dissatisfying, even irritating, but this is a love story. There is no tidiness. Blame it on the human heart. One way or another, it seems, we all perform vanishing tricks, effacing history, locking up our lives and slipping day by day into the graying shadows. Our whereabouts are uncertain. All secrets lead to the dark, and beyond teh dark there is only maybe. — Tim O'Brien

The sick man is taken away by the institution that takes charge not of the individual, but of his illness, an isolated object transformed or eliminated by technicians devoted to the defense of health the way others are attached to the defense of law and order or tidiness. — Michel De Certeau

Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived. Clutter is wonderfully fertile ground - you can still discover new treasures under all those piles, clean things up, edit things out, fix things, get a grip. Tidiness suggests that something is as good as it's going to get. Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation, while writing needs to breathe and move. — Anne Lamott

He longed for cleanliness and tidiness: it was hard to find peace in the middle of disorder. — Robin Hobb

Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived ... Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation ... Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here. — Anne Lamott

Being in your mid-thirties brought benefits, I reminded myself. You began to appreciate tidiness, smallness, things in their place. This is the shape your life has taken, I said. Be existential. Go to sleep. — Wally Lamb

Domestic work is the most elementary form of labor. It is suitable for those with the intelligence of rabbits. All it requires is cleanlines, tidiness and quickness - not moral or intellectual qualities at all, but merely the outward and visible signs of health. — Rebecca West

The greatest of mythologies divided its gods into creators, preservers and destroyers. Tidiness obviously belongs to the second category, which mitigates the terrific impact of the other two. — Freya Stark

Writing stories not only involved secrecy, it also gave her all the pleasures of miniaturization. A world could be made in five pages, and one that was more pleasing than a model farm. The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word
a glance . The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained. Her passion for tidiness was also satisfied, for an unruly world could be made just so. — Ian McEwan

Life may unfold chronologically for the body and for bureaucracies that keep track of such things as births, marriages, deaths, visas, tax returns, expulsions, and identity cards, but memory does not play this game in quite the same way, always manages to confound the desire for tidiness. — Ariel Dorfman

Men and women have different ideas of what constitutes tidiness. I tend to think it's about things being clean, but my mum and girlfriend are more about how things look. — Joe Thomas

Conservatism
hard work
saving one's money
looking neat and gentlemanly. It was such an Eveless paradise, that. — Theodore Dreiser

The front room of his house was what I called 'untidy chic'. Prefects weren't subject to the same Rules on room tidiness, but since no one really enjoyed clutter, a certain style of ordered untidiness was generally considered de couleur for a prefect's room. — Jasper Fforde

Oh, no. That's just a name. Oswald isn't a man, he's an ondageist. Have you heard of poltergeists?" "Er ... invisible spirits that throw things around?" "Good," said Miss Level. "Well, an ondageist is the opposite. They're obsessive about tidiness. He's quite handy around the house, but he's absolutely dreadful if he's in the kitchen when I'm cooking. He keeps putting things away. I think it makes him happy. Sorry, I should have warned you, but he normally hides if anyone comes to the cottage. He's shy." "And — Terry Pratchett

Do not think me fussy when I specify tidiness. It is essential ... In printing, remember that cleanliness and order wait upon success. — Walter J. Phillips

She could strive for perfection only in certain, few things; beyond that, it was important only to be tidy. — Amanda Coplin

The passion for tidiness is the historian's occupational disease. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation. — Anne Lamott

The normality of the house terrified her: the gleaming surfaces, the tidiness, the homey touches, the sense that a person lived here who might walk in daylight on any street and pass for human in spite of the atrocities that he had committed. — Dean Koontz