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Home
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“A good home is a place where children can do what they like ... but not to somebody else.”
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“Home is the dearest spot on earth, and it should be the center, though not the boundary, of the affections.”
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“'Home' is any four walls that enclose the right person.”
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“Home is wherever I go.”
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“Home ought to be our clearinghouse, the place from which we go forth lessoned and disciplined, and ready for life.”
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“Peace — that was the other name for home.”
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“We're a shifty, sliding population. ... What we refer to as 'home' may be a place we haven't seen in years; a place where there's no one left who knows our name.”
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“There is, apparently, some law of nature decreeing that all home construction must double in its projected cost and take four times longer than originally anticipated.”
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“... fully half of Household miseries arise from a lack of order.”
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“Every home has its influences, for good or evil, upon humanity at large.”
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“A good home owes it, as an expression of thankfulness for its own happiness, to try and make up something of the lack that is in other homes.”
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“Home is where you come to when you've got nothing better to do.”
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“A house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body.”
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“... I was convinced you can't go home again. Now I know better. Nothing is more untrue. I know you go back over and over again, seeking the self you left behind.”
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“A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless.”
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“... we all carry the Houses of our Youth inside, and our Parents, too, grown small enough to fit within our Hearts.”
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“Home is where your books are.”
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“And this is the way / We start the day / In a corner of Hell called home.”
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“There are places one comes home to that one has never been to ...”
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“Every house we have lived in, every building to which our hands have lent their work, belongs to us by virtue of love or of regret.”
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“Home is our little corner of eternity.”
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“She gave herself up to the feeling of being at home. It went all through her, that feeling, like getting into a warm bath when one is tired. She was safe from everything ...”
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“Ah! there is nothing like staying at home, for real comfort.”
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“Home! With what different sensations different people pronounce and hear that word pronounced!”
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“The home is the centre and circumference, the start and the finish, of most of our lives.”
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“The home is a human institution. All human institutions are open to improvement.”
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“The original necessity for the ceaseless presence of the woman to maintain that altar fire — and it was an altar fire in very truth at one period — has passed with the means of prompt ignition; the matchbox has freed the housewife from that incessant service, but the feeling that women should stay at home is with us yet.”
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“The best proof of man's dissatisfaction with the home is found in his universal absence from it.”
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“A man does not have to stay at home all day, in order to love it; why should a woman?”
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“[After her release as a political prisoner:] The taste of coffee turned out to be quite different from the way I remembered it. It was strange to feel the strap of my old watch on my wrist. The second hand scurried round, tapping out the moments, like a chicken trying to find its way out of an eggshell that stubbornly refuses to crack. What's the time? What's the season? An eternity has passed since I came home, but the clock says that it is only five hours. Should I try on those of my clothes which Igor couldn't bring himself to give away because I had made them myself, feeling that it would be like giving away a kitten to a stranger? Should we put on a cassette with our favourite songs? Should we just light a candle and sit together in silence, our arms around each other, watching October sliding down the other side of the window?”
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“Our home, our special country, is for all of us the place where we find liberation; a very difficult word ... that tries to describe something that can't be described but is the only thing worth having.”
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“My home is humble and unattractive to strangers, but to me it contains what I shall find nowhere else in the world — the ... affection which brothers and sisters feel for each other.”
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“A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen's Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen's Court has made all the succeeding Bowens.”
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“Home is the definition of God.”
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“My first house shall be built on these sands, / My second in the sea.”
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“For all the huffing and puffing of the doubters, a home of our own is still the rock on which our hopes are built. Price appreciation aside (and most houses will appreciate, eventually), homeownership is a state of mind. It's your piece of the earth. It's where a family's toes grow roots. It's where the flowers are yours, not God's.”
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“... a home is a source of energy, or should be, to the people who go in and out of it.”
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“A well-run home is a microcosm of sanity in a world that is plainly mad. If a home doesn't make sense, nothing does.”
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“Home can only come to its true dignity and power when the wife and mother is an equal partner in all that appertains to the sacred interests of the larger home of society and government.”
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“The capacity of the human mind to resist knowledge is nowhere more painfully illustrated than in the postulate laid down by average minds that home is always to be just what it is now — forgetting that in no two consecutive generations has it remained the same ...”
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“There is no comfort anywhere for anyone who dreads to go home.”
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“... there is a spirit in every home, a sort of composite spirit composed of the thoughts and feelings of the members of the family as a composite photograph is formed of the features of different individuals.”
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“If the members of a home are ill-temperered and quarrelsome, how quickly you feel it when you enter the house. You may not know just what is wrong, but you wish to make your visit short.”
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“... perpetuity in a home is a blanket for the cold years that come with age.”
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“Miss Froy loved her home with that intense perverted passion which causes ardent patriots to desert their native lands and makes men faithless to their wives. Like them, she left what she loved most — for the joy of the return.”
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“Anyone who has undergone home repair lately knows that your everyday artisan uses language so loosely and makes false promises so glibly as to make your politicians, even the presidential candidate, seem like a model of accuracy and rectitude. 'Be there Wednesday at nine,' the workman will tell you. It is a lie. He is humoring you. He says it to silence you, the way you tell a child you will take it to Disneyland if it will stop crying.”
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“The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
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“You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right.”
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“I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one's skin, at the extreme corners of one's eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.”
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“Home is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant. Parents, siblings, and neighbors are mysterious apparitions who come, go, and do strange unfathomable thing in and around the child, the region's only enfranchised citizen.”
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“... as roads go, the road home is as good as any.”
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“Having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night is a very old human need.”
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“Home is where the heart is, we say, rubbing the flint of one abstraction against another.”
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“... home wasn't built in a day.”
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“What is politeness in the home but the outcome of affection and self-respect, and the suppression of all those natural instincts of self-seeking that, allowed their way, produce the worst manners in the world?”
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“... it is amazing how all our paths of rebellion tend to lead us straight back home.”
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“... far away from my country I would be like those trees they chop down at Christmastime, those poor rootless pines that last a little while and then die.”
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“My new house is no home. / I realized a bit late — / it has conditions / I do not meet.”
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“The house begins to be a home. The unfamiliar places are beginning to fold the familiar objects into their keeping and to cozy them down. Objects that swore at each other when the movers heaved them into the new rooms have subsided into corners and sit to lick their feet and wash their faces like cats accepting a new home.”
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“Comfort me with apples! / For lo! I am sick; I am sad and opprest; / I come back to the place where, a child, I was blest. / Hope is false, love is vain, for the old things I sigh; / And if these cannot comfort me, then I must die! / Comfort me with apples!”
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“One sweetly solemn thought / Comes to me o'er and o'er; / I am nearer home to-day / Than I ever have been before ...”
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“There is nothing so difficult to describe as happiness. Whether some feeling of envy enters into the mind upon hearing of it, or whether it is so calm, so unassuming, so little ostentatious in itself, that words give an imperfect idea of it, I know not. It is easier to enjoy it, than define it. ... and is oftener found at home, when home has not been embittered by dissensions, suspicions and guilt, than any where else upon earth. Yes, it is in home and in those who watch there for us.”
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“Looking forward to going home, I was necessarily looking backward.”
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“Let woman out of the home, let man into it, should be the aim of education. The home needs man, and the world outside needs woman. Children need their fathers at home and they need their mothers outside of it. That is, the work of the world needs to be done by men and women together.”
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“The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house, whether cottage or castle; it stands for permanence and separation from the world.”
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“I don't know exactly why the notion of homeownership has such a grasp on the American imagination. Perhaps as descendants of landless immigrants we turn our plots into symbols of stability.”
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“The notion of place in which one owns and cares for a plot of land still exerts enormous influence on contemporary Americans. The extent and condition of our property, and our choice of style in dwelling, create a powerful emblem of our identity and status.”
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“Home is where we know — and are known — through accumulated experience.”
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“Cocooning is about insulation and avoidance, peace and protection, coziness and control — a sort of hyper-nesting.”
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“Cocooning: The need to protect oneself from the harsh, unpredictable realities of the outside world.”
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“Home is a place where we all do as we please — usually regardless of the others.”
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“... its lamplit walls were dear to her, with the extraordinary same dearness of all walls seen in tranquillity.”
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“But then Mary belonged to that happy class of mortals who could set up their Lares and Penates inside any four walls.”
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“This is the age of the apartment. Not only in the great cities, but in the smaller centers of civilization the apartment has come to stay. ... A decade ago the apartment was considered a sorry makeshift in America, though it has been successful abroad for more years than you would believe.”
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“... a man may build and decorate a beautiful house, but it remains for a woman to make a home of it for him. It is the personality of the mistress that the home expresses. Men are forever guests in our homes, no matter how much happiness they may find there.”
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“You will express yourself in your house whether you want to or not.”
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“Don't you know you can't go home again?”
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“But when you dwell in a house you mislike, you will look out of a window a deal more than those that are content with their dwelling.”
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“If you go into a home and there is no laughter, you know there's a real problem. ”
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“... home ... is life's undress rehearsal, its back-room, its dressing-room, from which we go forth to more careful and guarded intercourse, leaving behind us much débris of cast-off and every-day clothing.”
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“There are homes you run from, and homes you run to ...”
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“Seems to me home is where I am loved and safe and needed.”
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“The woman who creates and sustains a home ... is a creator second only to God. ”
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“Enlightenment is being able to go to your own home and feel comfortable.”
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“But gradually as I listened to my Anishinabe friends, it came to me that 'home' is a figment in the traveler's mind, a place where one's language fits and references make sense. I can own this place only in my imagination.”
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“Sweet is the hour that brings us home, / Where all will spring to meet us; / Where hands are striving, as we come, / To be the first to greet us.”
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“Trips do not end when you return home — usually this is the time when in a sense they really begin.”
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“My prairie people are my home / Bird I return flying to their breasts.”
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“Giving up her home had been a much greater wrench than she had expected. ... She had a curious sense of her own roots twined around the house, as she had once seen a tree's roots around an old shrine. In time the roots had grown into every crevice until shrine and tree were one indestructible entity.”
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“From my family I have learned the secrets / of never having a home.”
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“... the alchemy of home life went far to turn the dross of the Ghetto into gold.”
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“That I can live long enough / To obtain one and only one desire — / That someday I can see again / The mulberry and catalpa trees of home.”
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“[Line from Sleepless in Seattle:] It was like coming home, but not to any home I'd ever known.”
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“There is probably no thrill in life to compare with that of turning the key in one's first house or apartment.”
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“In home life contentment is an essential to daily comfort. One discontented person in the house creates an atmosphere fatal to tranquillity.”
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“Keep the Home-fires burning.”
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“... if you go away from your own place and people — the place you spent your childhood in, all your life you'll be sick with homesickness and you'll never have a home. You can find a better place, perhaps, a way of life you like better, but the home is gone out of your heart, and you'll be hunting it all your life long.”
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“... home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserves; it is life's undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room from which we go forth to more careful and guarded intercourse ...”
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“I gave my love to the house forever. / I will come till I cannot come, I said, / And the house said, I will know.”
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“It isn't walls and furniture that make a home. It's the family.”
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“Home is someplace where you belong. Where you're wanted, and respected, and loved. Unconditionally. Home is where there's a place for you.”
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“After long absence, of return / To my dear home — Oh, happiness! / To lie in blissful consciousness / Of all around: The picture there — / The books — the flower-glass filled with care / By a kind hand — And then to know, / 'Twas but to rise, and meet below / Such a heart's welcome!”
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“Home can and should be the place where we get in touch with our individuality, our true nature. Home can and should be a place where we regularly experience our most sublime emotions.”
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“Our home is an autobiography, a journal, a scrapbook of our past, our present, and future dreams.”
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“Home is why I bother / ... / Home is who's hoping to be there with me / Home is how I begin and end.”
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“Sometime in their lives, everybody wanted to go home.”
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“Home, as far as I'm concerned, is the place you have to leave. And then, if you're like me, spend the rest of your life mourning.”
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“... one must find one's natural home, not try to construct it.”
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“Do they miss me at home, do they miss me? / 'T would be an assurance most dear / To know that this moment some loved one / Was saying, 'Oh were she but here!'”
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“Moving out of our home can take hours; leaving home can take a lifetime.”
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“It is a lamb of a house, a dove, a child, a dear kind woman of a house.”
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“Wherever I can find a place to sit down and write, that is my home.”
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“... my home is where my books are ...”
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“My address is like my shoes: it travels with me.”
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“But everybody needs a home / so at least you have someplace to leave / which is where most other folks will say / you must be coming from.”
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“Home can never be transferred; never repeated in the experience of an individual. The place consecrated by parental love, by the innocence and sports of childhood, by the first acquaintance with nature; by the linking of the heart to the visible creation, is the only home.”
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“The way back is always shorter.”
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“... every house that is a family home has a soul ...”
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“To one of my intense inter-uterine nature there is no measuring the shock that the loss of a house can cause.”
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“Any one who has desperately needed to come home knows what a tremendous feeling it is to be lying in his own bed!”
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“Home was always the place she went to when she had to start over.”
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“But for the exile, as for ailing / Or jailed folk, always have I bled. / Deep shadows are your lone path veiling / And ever sour is alien bread.”
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“Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you as changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.”
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“... it is only through the home that a people can become really good and truly great ...”
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“Someone who has been far away from home / for a long time can still find the light switch. / Instantly.”
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“Home is a symbol of the self. Caring for a home is caring for one's self.”
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“People who are homeless are not social inadequates. They are people without houses.”
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“In most of the traditional cultures of the world, homelessness would be impossible; first because of large protective kin systems, and second because homes were easily constructed from materials at hand. In America today we consider homelessness as a lack of shelter, not as a breakdown of community.”
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“Can't spare the requisite / eye contact, attention, energy. / Swallowed whole by / the deities of / experience and capitalism, / we've nary a moment / to be present with one another.”
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“I carry home within my self. / Mine is a nomadic tribe, / home as location is a concept / foreign and bizarre to me. / I carry home within my self.”
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“For some people, there is no room in their landscape for the needy, the marginal and abandoned unless they are in a painting hanging on the wall of a museum or in a production of Les Misérables. There, the destitute and impoverished are appreciated as art. Their appearances are acceptable as long as they are not alive.”
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“Don't look at the dying; / you'll only encourage them. / The homeless, the hungry, the hurting, / they're not really there / and it's not polite to stare. / ... / Pretty soon the cops'll clear them / all away / anyway, / and your eyes will be safe. / And when you're dying / (oh yes you will) / no one will look.”
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“A cold wind rises where there's only so much / and anyone with a food stamp or a rag doll / must've stolen it, maybe from me. / We're clutching at everything to keep off that wind / but it doesn't work. Big wind blowing away — / who were they, when they had names?”
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“Living on the street, / under the bushes close up to the church / outside where the ground is protected by frost / they shelter themselves, the ones who've lost. / The ones we've lost, but still our own, / our children, our sisters, our brother's child. / Is anyone you've loved and known / without a home? Is anyone without a home / someone you can love?”
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“... but for the homeless all ways wither / like cut flowers ...”
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“The first thing you lose when you become homeless is your dignity.”
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“Malls are insular fantasy worlds where the relatively well-off pursue the study and acquisition of superfluous goods as a form of entertainment, in a society in which millions are in desperate need of something to eat and a safe, warm place to sleep.”
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“Poor people are allowed the same dreams as everyone else.”
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“I, John Shepherd, vagrant, / Petition the park commissioners / For wider benches.”
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“people in houses are sure that you want / to be out in the wind and the cold. / people in houses grow more and more certain / while we just grow tired and old ...”
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“brother of mine are you out in the rain / do you need a hot meal or a hand / brother of mine you don't have to explain / some of us here understand ...”