Wallpaper With Quotes & Sayings

Was it worth while to lay
with infinite exertion
a roof I can't live under?
- All those blueprints,
closings of gaps,
measurings, calculations?
A life I didn't choose
chose me: even
my tools are the wrong ones
for what I have to do.
I'm naked, ignorant,
a naked man fleeing
across the roofs
who could with a shade of difference
be sitting in the lamplight
against the cream wallpaper
reading - not with indifference
about a naked man
fleeing across the roofs. — Adrienne Rich

The butterfly wallpaper was now gone. It had been replaced by a moody, breathless wallpaper of silver, sprinkled with tiny white dots that looked like stars. It made her feel an odd sense of anticipation, like last night. Grandpa Vance couldn't have come in last night and done this.
Did it really change on its own?
It was beautiful, this wallpaper. It made the room look like living in a cloud. She put her hand against the wall by her dresser. It was soft, like velvet. How could her mother not have told her a room like this existed? She'd never mentioned it. Not even in a bedtime story. — Sarah Addison Allen

I could wallpaper a room with rejection letters. — Robin Moore

The guilt of moving on seeps into my life every time I do something I thought I couldn't do without you. Every time I make a financial decision, I take over your job. Every time I fix the washing machine, choose a wallpaper without consulting you, I feel guilty. How dare I function without you! What could you have possibly meant to me if I can function without you? Much less, function well. Every so often I'm overwhelmed with the decisions. In those moments I hate you for leaving me. But I am stronger now, and I like being strong. And for this, I feel guilty. When can I stop proving that I loved you? When will I stop believing that loving you better might have saved you? — Stephanie Ericsson

The wallpaper with which the men of science have covered the world of reality is falling to tatters. The grand whorehouse which they have made of life requires no decoration; it is essential that only the drains function adequately. Beauty, that feline beauty that has us by the balls in America, is finished. — Henry Miller

Every plain wall deserves a piece of work, so why not cover it with a smile? — Shawn Lukas

Because I've been around forever and ever, like wallpaper, people ask me for secrets ... it's the same with my skin care range; that's out of necessity. As soon as I saw the first signs, I bought everything in the market. — Lulu

He returned in a moment with a phone, a high-end model that probably cost way more than hers. His cell phone wallpaper was an abstract artwork with lots of colorful circles and blots - Kandinsky, maybe, or Miro? She always got those
two confused. She gave him points for not having a picture of some scantily-clad woman thrusting her boobs at the camera, like Steve had on his phone. Tacky. Nude-woman wallpapers were the cell phone equivalent of silver naked-lady mud flaps, in her opinion. — Linda Morris

We have all of us to some extent become inured to a culture where viciousness and depravity are simply taken for granted, like some hideous wallpaper we have lived with for years. — Roger Kimball

Leatherbound books are an expensive form of wallpaper, and yet every English nobleman's home seems to have had them. Their endless sets of the works of Cooper and Scott and Goethe, in finely tanned bindings with marbled endpapers, all end up with this sort of dealer sooner or later. I look through a set of Cooper and, without surprise, find uncut pages: these books were never actually read. — Paul Collins

We need less posturing and more genuine charisma. Charisma was originally a religious term, meaning "of the spirit" or "inspired." It's about letting God's light shine through us. It's about a sparkle in people that money can't buy. It's an invisible energy with visible effects. To let go, to just love, is not to fade into the wallpaper. Quite the contrary, it's when we truly become bright. We're letting our own light shine. — Marianne Williamson

The problem: affordable housing has to be subsidised, if the 'affordable' bit of the phrase is going to work. The solution: replace every wall, ceiling and floor with a gigantic plasma screen and charge for advertising space. The affordable living room of tomorrow is a futuristic cube with a perpetually looping Go Compare commercial in place of carpets and wallpaper. — Charlie Brooker

When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more. — C.S. Lewis

As far as Death was aware, the sole reason for any human association with pigs and lambs was as a prelude to chops and sausages. Quite why they should dress up for children's wallpaper as well was a mystery. Hello, little folk, this is what you're going to eat ... He felt that if only he could find the key to it, he'd know a lot more about human beings. — Terry Pratchett

It was an ugly flower, pink with yellow-tipped stamens sticking out of the center. It deserved to die. Zoe pulled the hammer back in a slow motion and snapped it forward. There was a delicious sound of cracking plaster as the flower dissolved into rubble. White dust rose all around here.
"I hate that wallpaper," she said — Pamela Todd

OLD MARX He can't think. London is damp, in every room someone coughs. He never did like winter. He rewrites past manuscripts time and again, without passion. The yellow paper is fragile as consumption. Why does life race stubbornly toward destruction? But spring returns in dreams, with snow that doesn't speak in any known tongue. And where does love fit within his system? Where you find blue flowers. He despises anarchists, idealists bore him. He receives reports from Russia, far too detailed. The French grow rich. Poland is common and quiet. America never stops growing. Blood is everywhere, perhaps the wallpaper needs changing. He begins to suspect that poor humankind will always trudge across the old earth like the local lunatic shaking her fists at an unseen God. — Adam Zagajewski

The light from the moon shone along the door casing and spread across the walls a few inches inside, far enough for her to suddenly notice that the phases-of-the-moon wallpaper she'd been living with all week was gone. It was a now curious dark color she couldn't quite make out, punctuated by long strips of yellow. It looked almost like dark doors and windows opening, letting in light. The wallpaper was usually some reflection of her mood or situation, but what did this mean? Some new door was opening? Something was being set free? — Sarah Addison Allen

Perhaps someone had once hoped to lighten the air of the blue room in Hill House with a dainty wallpaper, not seeing how such a hope would evaporate in Hill House, leaving only the faintest hint of its existence, like an almost inaudible echo of sobbing far away... — Shirley Jackson

Everything I am inside is pink and blue. Pastels without, soft clouds above, blue sky everywhere with an occasional rain but from renewal, not anger. My mind has no boundaries. Its floor is poetry, the wallpaper music. The windows are always open to allow the humor to drift in and out. The furniture is made of air, I am forever floating. — Kimberly Jo Smith

Technology is making design more exciting, with color, wallpaper, textures, fabrics that could never have been created without the technology. — David Bromstad

Urs Fischer specializes in making jaws drop. Cutting giant holes in gallery walls, digging a crater in Gavin Brown's gallery floor in 2007, creating amazing hyperrealist wallpaper for a group show at Tony Shafrazi: It all percolates with uncanny destructiveness, operatic uncontrollability, and barbaric sculptural power. — Jerry Saltz

You know, you can always do a three some."
"A three some?" I frowned. "No."
He shrugged. "Just a thought."
"Yeah, a dumb one," I spat.
"Hey! I didn't call your idea to re-wallpaper the kitchen a dumb idea!"
"You have a problem with the new paper?" I demanded.
"Pop, please, it's hideous," Trick said. — Kira4Inu

But flirting does not come easily to someone brought up in a remote castle with tartan wallpaper in the bathrooms, bagpipes at dawn and men who wear kilts. — Rhys Bowen

To have been part of a Pharaonic slave system that had at its apex a divine sun king led him to understand unreality as the greatest force in life. And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not matter - professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size of an office or the matter of a dedicated car parking space - was vested with the greatest significance, and everything that did matter - pleasure, joy, friendship, love - was deemed somehow peripheral. It made for dullness mostly and weirdness generally. — Richard Flanagan

The main part of the house is a deep red and I have butterscotch carpet. And I have a bathroom with leopard skin floor, wallpaper and toilet. — Macy Gray

My childhood bedroom had wallpaper that was printed with clouds and rainbows. — Brad Goreski

From then on, he was convinced that the universe dazzled mankind with volcanic eruptions, but had its own secret way of communicating with the select few, people like Andrew who looked at reality as though it were a strip of wallpaper covering up something else. — Felix J. Palma

It was all real and blazing with detail.
But I was shadow, light as mist, mute as the wallpaper. — Laura Whitcomb

Great splashes of dried blood, flecked with tiny bits of grayish-white tissue, clotted the wallpaper. It made Danny feel sick. It was like a crazy picture drawn in blood, a surrealistic etching of a man's face drawn back in terror and pain, the mouth yawning and half the head pulverized - (So if you should see something ... just look the other way and when you look back, it'll be gone. Are you diggin me?) — Stephen King

The monsters in our cupboards and our minds are always there in the darkness, like mould beneath the floorboards and behind the wallpaper, and there is so much darkness, an inexhaustible supply of darkness. The universe is amply supplied with night. — Neil Gaiman

Sleeping on the Ceiling
It is so peaceful on the ceiling!
It is the Place de la Concorde.
The little crystal chandelier
is off, the fountain is in the dark.
Not a soul is in the park.
Below, where the wallpaper is peeling,
the Jardin des Plantes has locked its gates.
Those photographs are animals.
The mighty flowers and foliage rustle;
under the leaves the insects tunnel.
We must go under the wallpaper
to meet the insect-gladiator,
to battle with a net and trident,
and leave the fountain and the square.
But oh, that we could sleep up there ... — Elizabeth Bishop

Like the rest of the house, it was beautifully appointed with shiny European wallpaper, lavender-scented soap and an oil painting over the toilet. Geoff — Dan Skinner

And between them, the little shoe-box glistening with scarlet wallpaper and gilt like a fairy coffin. Inside it, there was the crabbed corpse of a still-born child wreathed in bloody newspaper.

"I hated you so much," she said softly. — James Reaney

A long hallway, hung profusely with dark, water-stained sporting prints, served as a lobby, in which centuries of sacrificed kippers had left the smell of their smoky souls clinging to the wallpaper. Only the patch of sunshine visible through the open front door relieved the gloom — Alan Bradley

In moments of great stress, the mind focuses itself upon some quite unimportant matter which is remembered long afterwards with the utmost fidelity, driven in, as it were, by the mental stress of the moment. It may be some quite irrelevant detail, like the pattern of a wallpaper, but it will never be forgotten. — Agatha Christie

An old house is alive with ghosts. Each person that lived there made some kind of mark; if not in the choice of paint or cabinetry, then in a ding in the wall, a faucet with the handles installed backward, or a name carved out in the wallpaper behind the bed in secret. In some way, each voice that wandered its rooms whispers, "I was here. — Jessica L. Randall

The room was dark and velvety from the royal blue wallpaper with its gold pattern, but even here the echo of the flaming day shimmered brassily on the picture frames, on doorknobs and glided borders, although it came through the filter of the dense greenery of the garden. — Bruno Schulz

We may yearn for rustic detail and old-world charm, but those who have it set their minds on vinyl wallpaper, fitted carpets and all mod cons. — Tahir Shah

Maloney looked around my room and nodded like he approved of the extravagance surrounding him: the inch-thick carpet with its diamond designs, the half moon flock of the wallpaper, and the antique furniture, polished to a museum quality shine. The two goons he brought with him flanked the door, equally impressed, I could tell by their dropped jaws and roving, wanton eyes. One of them set a briefcase on the floor beside him. Finally Maloney's eyes found me, and his expression turned from amazement to shock.
"I didn't expect you to be
"
"A Vampire?" I asked, feeling the touch of a smile form on my lips. — Craig Jones

The door was open; I stepped in. A ghost town with a ghost theater, yet the former grandness still evident, the gold wallpaper peeling, the velvet seats in attendant rows, though ripped and ruined. Why did I cry? Not because it was a wreck, but because I felt the history. — Dana Spiotta

Does that change things?" asked the old man. "Maybe
Anansi's just some guy from a story, made up back in Africa in
the dawn days of the world by some boy with blackfly on his leg,
pushing his crutch in the dirt, making up some goofy story
about a man made of tar. Does that change anything? People respond
to the stories. They tell them themselves. The stories
spread, and as people tell them, the stories change the tellers.
Because now the folk who never had any thought in their head
but how to run from lions and keep far enough away from rivers
that the crocodiles don't get an easy meal, now they're starting to
dream about a whole new place to live. The world may be the
same, but the wallpaper's changed. Yes? People still have the
same story, the one where they get born and they do stuff and
they die, but now the story means something different to what it
meant before. — Neil Gaiman

The manner in which Americans 'consume' music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie
it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made. — Frank Zappa

Aubade with a Broken Neck The first night you don't come home summer rains shake the clematis. I bury the dead moth I found in our bed, scratch up a rutabaga and eat it rough with dirt. The dog finds me and presents between his gentle teeth a twitching nightjar. In her panic, she sings in his mouth. He gives me her pain like a gift, and I take it. I hear the cries of her young, greedy with need, expecting her return, but I don't let her go until I get into the house. I read the auspices - the way she flutters against the wallpaper's moldy roses means all can be lost. How she skims the ceiling means a storm approaches. You should see her in the beginnings of her fear, rushing at the starless window, her body a dart, her body the arrow of longing, aimed, as all desperate things are, to crash not into the object of desire, but into the darkness behind it. — Traci Brimhall

Home is the wallpaper above the bed, the family dinner table, the church bells in the morning, the bruised shins of the playground, the small fears that come with dusk, the streets and squares and monuments and shops that constitute one's first universe. — Henry Anatole Grunwald

I was wary of my sister's cooking, which invariably consisted of a tubular pasta and economy cheese, charred black on the surface, with either tinned tuna or lardy mince lurking beneath the molten crust ... So that evening, in a tiny flat in Tooting, I was pushed into the tiny kitchen where sixteen people sat crammed around a tiny trestle table designed for pasting wallpaper, one of my sister's notorious pasta bakes smouldering in its centre like a meteorite, smelling of toasted cat food. — David Nicholls

Cole stood in a living room of chicken hell. Wallpaper with chickens on it. Chicken clock. Chicken pillows. Framed plates with chickens on it. — Alessandra Torre

He was becoming an effective human being. He had learned from his birth family how to snare rabbits, make stew, paint fingernails, glue wallpaper, conduct ceremonies, start outside fires in a driving rain, sew with a sewing machine, cut quilt squares, play Halo, gather, dry, and boil various medicine teas. He had learned from the old people how to move between worlds seen and unseen. Peter taught him how to use an ax, a chain saw, safely handle a .22, drive a riding lawn mower, drive a tractor, even a car. Nola taught him how to paint walls, keep animals, how to plant and grow things, how to fry meat, how to bake. Maggie taught him how to hide fear, fake pain, how to punch with a knuckle jutting. How to go for the eyes. How to hook your fingers in a person's nose from behind and threaten to rip the nose off your face. He hadn't done these things yet, and neither had Maggie, but she was always looking for a chance. When — Louise Erdrich

India, she now knew, would not be content staying in the background, was nobody's wallpaper, insisted in interjecting itself into everyone's life, meddling with it, twisting it, molding it beyond recognition. India, she had found out, was a place of political intrigue and economic corruption, a place occupied by real people with their incessantly human needs, desires, ambitions, and aspirations, and not the exotic, spiritual, mysterious entity that was a creation of the Western imagination. — Thrity Umrigar

Then he was gone, and Prentice was alone in a silence that rang with all his shrill, unspoken words. He was so alone that the only thing to do was lie back on the bed and roll over and draw up his knees like an unborn baby, staring with dry eyes at a cluster of pink flowers on the wallpaper, knowing he had never been so alone in his life. — Richard Yates

Who can ever affirm, or deny that the houses which have sheltered us as children, or as adults, and our predecessors too, do not have embedded in their walls, one with the dust and cobwebs, one with the overlay of fresh wallpaper and paint, the imprint of what-has-been, the suffering, the joy? — Daphne Du Maurier

Penelope gulped down the tea she'd been in the process of sipping. Colin had a way of looking at a person, his green eyes so focused and intent that you felt as if you must be the only two people in the universe. Unfortunately for Penelope, it also seemed to have a way of reducing her to a stammering imbecile. If they were in the midst of a conversation, she could generally hold her own, but when he surprised her like that, turning his attention onto her just when she'd convinced herself she blended in perfectly with the wallpaper, she was completely and utterly lost. — Julia Quinn

The flukey part of it is, back in the early days, I had that guitar decorated with all kinds of crap wallpaper, 'Flower Power' - then that got all shaved off. And during the course of cleaning the bass up again, some of the wood got shaved down, and it probably became a lighter body than the stock factory model. — Chris Squire

His blue eyes watched her as she walked to him, and the room was filled with the quietness of afternoon sunlight. It fell through the window, across the rocking chair, hit broadside the wallpaper with its brightness. The mahogany bed knobs shone. Through the curved-out window was the blue of the sky, the bayberry bush, the stone wall. The silence of this sunshine, of the world, seemed to fold over Olive with a shiver of ghastliness, as she stood feeling the sun on her bare wrist. She watched him, looked away, looked at him again. To sit down beside him would be to close her eyes to the gaping loneliness of this sunlit world. — Elizabeth Strout

One morning while drinking coffee with Amos, Daniel Haws looked up suddenly, as if feeling the boy's eyes on him, and said:
"Tryin' to burn holes starin' like that?"
"Guess I was just resting my eyes on you so as not to look at your wallpaper," Amos gave a sour apology.
Daniel closed the book he was reading, a volume of Rhodes's history of the United States, and took a careful look at the kitchen wallpaper.
"Yes," he admitted, "that wallpaper is goddam ancient. — James Purdy

Too much - too tempting - to have my hands on it and not look at it. Quickly I slid it out, and almost immediately its glow enveloped me, something almost musical, an internal sweetness that was inexplicable beyond a deep, blood-rocking harmony of rightness, the way your heart beat slow and sure when you were with a person you felt safe with and loved. A power, a shine, came off it, a freshness like the morning light in my old bedroom in New York which was serene yet exhilarating, a light that rendered everything sharp-edged and yet more tender and lovely than it actually was, and lovelier still because it was part of the past, and irretrievable: wallpaper glowing, the old Rand McNally globe in half-shadow. — Donna Tartt

I don't like to think of her as pretend Peabody anymore. The more we find out, the meaner and crazier she gets. It's like it's bad enough fake Peabody got murdered, but now fake Peabody is a dead, blackmailing asshole on top of it. It's depressing."
"Yeah, it's all really too bad for you."
"Well, it kind of is. How am I supposed to enjoy the vid now, when I'll be thinking how behind the scenes I was trying to blackmail McNab into bed, and the whole time he's in love with you? And that maybe there's a vid of the two of you all naked and sexy and - "
"Stop right there before I boot."
"Hey! Maybe there's a vid of fake Peabody and fake Roarke all naked and sexy. That would definitely make up for it. Maybe I can get a copy."
"There's going to be a vid of me tearing strips off your ass then using them to wallpaper my office. I'll make copies for everybody. Get Marlo down here. I'll start on Julian. — J.D. Robb

Gamache loved to see inside the homes of people involved in a case. To look at the choices they made for their most intimate space. The colors, the decorations. The aromas. Were there books? What sort?

How did it feel?

He'd been in shacks in the middle of nowhere, carpets worn, upholstery torn, wallpaper peeling off. But stepping in he'd also noticed the smell of fresh coffee and bread. Walls were taken up with immense smiling graduation photos and on rusty pocked TV trays stood modest chipped vases with cheery daffodils or pussy willows or some tiny wild flower picked by worn hands for eyes that would adore it.

And he'd been in mansions that felt like mausoleums. — Louise Penny

BRAINSTORMING! Every night after dinner - which is usually something like tuna noodle casserole made with cream-of-wallpaper soup - I escape to the privacy of my bedroom. — James Patterson

At home in the nursery, I usually played alone. Actually, I seldom played, I spoke to the wallpaper. The many dark circles in the pattern of the wallpaper seemed like people to me. I made up stories in which they appeared, either I told them the stories or they played with me, I never got tired of the wallpaper people and I could talk to them for hours. — Elias Canetti

To ward off a feeling of failure, she joked that she could wallpaper her bathroom with rejection slips, which she chose not to see as messages to stop, but rather as tickets to the game. — Anita Shreve

But here there were houses full of *stuff*, fancy sheets woven with silk floss as soft as a baby's bum; fancy washstands carved of dark wood that glowed like cherries where the light hit it; curtains the shade of the summer sky, heavy and glossy and smooth to the touch. The velvet-flocked wallpaper was so soft beneath her fingertips that had her eyes been closed, she might have thought she was brushing the belly of a rabbit.
And the stool in the corner! One wouldn't imagine you'd get too fancy with such a piece, but this stool was covered with embroidery so fine that her knuckles ached just looking at the stitches. Unbelievable. The rich even spoiled their arses! — Meredith Duran

We were convinced that she looked on with indifference if she noticed us at all. Today I know that everything watches, that nothing goes unseen, and that even wallpaper has a better memory than ours. It isn't God in His heaven that sees all. A kitchen chair, a coathanger, a half-filled ash tray, or the wooden replica of a woman named Niobe can perfectly well serve as an unforgetting witness to every one of our acts. — Gunter Grass

Picture a place called the Karma Kafe and it'll save me the bother of describing it. There was nothing in it you wouldn't expect, from the Buddha flowerpots to the wallpaper decorated with symbols that probably said, If you bought this just because it looked pretty, may Buddha piss in your coffee, you culturally ignorant moron. — Kelley Armstrong

I walk across the park to her flat. It is over-heated and there is a great deal of pink. This used not to unnerve me. Now when I step into the bathroom I recoil.
Pink bath, pink basin, pink toilet, pink bidet, pink tiles, pink wallpaper, pink rug. Brushes, soap, tooth brush, silk flowers, toilet paper: all pink. Even the little foot-operated waste-bin is pale pink. I know this little waste-bin well. Every time I sleep here I wonder what I am doing with my time and hers. She is sixteen years younger than I am. She is not the woman with whom I want to share my life. But, having begun, what we have continues. She wants it to, and I go along with it, through lust and loneliness, I suppose; and laziness, and lack of focus. — Vikram Seth

And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not matter - professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size of an office or the matter of a dedicated car parking space - was treated with the greatest significance, and everything that did matter - pleasure, joy, friendship, loved - was deemed somehow peripheral. — Richard Flanagan

Meanwhile, as we read, two little girls slept as if couched on zephyrs on the south side of the parlor floor, in a room that had bunny wallpaper ... and a bookcase crammed with the collected Beatrix Potter. Snow White was in a youth bed and Rose Red was in a crib, and next to them was the little blue and white guest room that one of them would have one day. Because I recognize emotions only in retrospect, I didn't know that I was happy. As always, there was something nagging at my mind's corners. But I did know that I had all that it is proper in this world to wish for. — Mary Cantwell

My friend Sally is a nudist. I went to her house. The closets have no doors. The walls are covered with see-through wallpaper. — Steven Wright

Most writers, including myself, had to endure a lot of rejections before finally getting published. You could wallpaper a sizeable bathroom with the rejection slips I have received. Don't ever give up! — Jonathan Weeks

The air was so thick with testosterone that the wallpaper was getting soggy. — Nelson DeMille

I am a plant, she said, I need fire, earth, water. Otherwise I will be stunted. And: Is marriage not such a stunting? The fire goes out. The wind grows weak. The earth dries out. The water dwindles. I would die. You too. She tossed her hair over her shoulders. Purple lavender. And what if it wasn't like that, I argued. What if the daily routine, our daily routine, is my promise to you? Your toothbrush next to mine. You get annoyed because I've forgotten to turn the light off in the bathroom. We choose wallpaper we think is horrible a year later. You tell me I'm getting a belly. Your forgetfulness. You've left your umbrella somewhere again. I snore, you can't sleep. In my dream I whisper your name...You tie my tie. Wave goodbye to me as I go to work. I think: you are like a fluttering flag. I think it with a stabbing pain in my heart. For Heaven's sake, is that not enough? Is that not enough to be happy? She turned away: Give me time. I'll think about it. — Milena Michiko Flasar

Doesn't this place give you the creeps? You could perhaps do something with some floral wallpaper and a fire-bomb. — Terry Pratchett