Top 100 Chimney Quotes
#1. You've only talked like that since you became a horrid what's-his-name. You know what I mean. What do you call a man who wants to embrace the chimney-sweep?" "A saint," said Father Brown. "I think," said Sir Leopold, with a supercilious smile, "that Ruby means a Socialist.
G.K. Chesterton
#2. The south-wind strengthens to a gale, / Across the moon the clouds fly fast, / The house is smitten as with a flail, / The chimney shudders to the blast.
Robert Bridges
#3. Bob slid his chair back and moved the coal-oil lamp from the kitchen to the sitting room. He said, "Oftentimes things seem impossible up until they're attempted." Then he lidded the chimney glass with his palm and suffocated the light.
Ron Hansen
#4. It is this refrain that we hear repeated by everyone: you are not at home, this is not a sanatorium, the only exit is by way of the Chimney. (What did it mean? Soon we were all to learn what it meant.)
Primo Levi
#5. Gulls, aeroplaning above the chimney pots, were calling that he must talk to Laura about his plans. He needed no telling, for once in tune to their outlandish cries.
Alan Sillitoe
#6. Come, come," said Mrs. Wiggins. "Stop your fighting, animals. If there are swallows in that chimney, it means that there hasn't been a fire built in the house in a long time. And that means that nobody lives there. Let's get inside." Bang,
Walter R. Brooks
#7. The sky was dark and gloomy, the air was damp and raw, the streets were wet and sloppy. The smoke hung sluggishly above the chimney-tops as if it lacked the courage to rise, and the rain came slowly and doggedly down, as if it had not even the spirit to pour.
Charles Dickens
#8. Smell and taste are in fact but a single composite sense, whose laboratory is the mouth and its chimney the nose.
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
#9. Leave a chimney-sweep alone when you see him, Chiltern. Should he run against you, then remember that it is one of the necessary penalties of clean linen that it is apt to be soiled.
Anthony Trollope
#10. A legal broom's a moral chimney-sweeper, And that's the reason he himself's so dirty
Lord Byron
#11. A deistical prater, fit to sit in the chimney-corner of a pot-house, and make blasphemous comments on the one greasy newspaper fingered by beer-swilling tinkers.
George Eliot
#12. Eve showed Aidan how to rake the range. "I think when we're married we might have something more modern," he grumbled. "No, surely with the eight children we can have them stoking it, going up the chimney even.
Maeve Binchy
#13. in the crook of her elbow as she went. Above her, over an apartment building and a tavern, she saw the expanse of a large square building with a flat roof and a single cylinder chimney. It was a tan-brick warehouse with dark broken windows. An abandoned bird's
Charlie N. Holmberg
#14. Silkes and Satins put out the fire in the chimney.
George Herbert
#15. From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came,
H.P. Lovecraft
#16. After two hours and a half of this odd travelling (including a stoppage at a small town, where we were saluted by a gun considerably bigger than our own chimney), we reached Hartford,
Charles Dickens
#17. Authors want their names down in history; I want to keep the smoke coming out of the chimney.
Mickey Spillane
#18. He describes it as a large apartment, with a red brick floor and a capacious chimney; the ceiling garnished with hams, sides of bacon, and ropes of onions.
Charles Dickens
#19. I'm stuck in the fucking chimney." She
J.R. Ward
#20. The image by Barry Blitt of Barack Obama and Michelle in the White House with him dressed as a terrorist, her dressed as an Angela Davis character, a flag burning in the chimney, a portrait of Bin Laden on the wall is an image I'm extremely proud of.
Francoise Mouly
#21. In civilised society law is the chimney through which all that smoke discharges itself that used to circulate through the whole house,
Walter Scott
#22. She grew more and more silent about what really mattered. She curled inside herself like one of those black chimney brushes, the little shellfish you see on the beach, and you touch them, and then go inside and don't come out.
Janet Frame
#23. Someday I'll wish upon a star And wake up where the clouds Are far behind me Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops that's where you'll find me
Eva Cassidy
#24. No amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood.
H.P. Lovecraft
#25. Make the doors upon a woman's wit,
and it will out at the casement;
shut that, and 'twill out at the key-hole;
stop that, 'twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney.
William Shakespeare
#26. Apparently, he uses disguises sometimes in the course of his investigations. In his liaison with Mariah, he used them for discretion. He came to her once dressed as a chimney sweep. Quite invigorating, don't you think?
Deanna Raybourn
#27. We all ought to understand we're on our own. Believing in Santa Claus doesn't do kids any harm for a few years but it isn't smart for them to continue waiting all their lives for him to come down the chimney with something wonderful. Santa Claus and God are cousins.
Andy Rooney
#28. Nick, fetch my car, fetch my clothes, sweep the chimney, make my bed, watch my psychopath, fetch my slippers.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#29. An earth hard as iron lay locked beneath a sky whose mottled clouds spit snow like ashes sucked up a chimney and then dispersed with the smoke.
John Updike
#30. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antarctic, or coming down as rain in the rainforests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere.
Mark Haddon
#31. When I set out from the boy's attic window, my head was so full of competing plans and complex stratagems that I didn't look where I was going and flew straight into a chimney.
Something symbolic in that. It's what fake freedom does for you.
Jonathan Stroud
#32. Such Roots as are soft, your best way is to dry in the Sun, or else hang them up in the Chimney corner upon a string; as for such as are hard you may dry them any where.
Nicholas Culpeper
#33. I'd like to start with the chimney jokes - I've got a stack of them. The first one is on the house.
Tim Vine
#34. If SANTA CLAUS came down the chimney in a f**king jogging suit, you wouldn't even know it was him.
Wayne Coyne
#35. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.
Charles Dickens
#36. Every year, dads will dress up as Santa and try to surprise their kids by coming down the chimney, and every year, a dad gets stuck and dies.
Kyle Dunnigan
#37. That's crazy. Are Witches the one who help the big fat man get down the chimney too?"
"You know it, girl.
Brandy Nacole
#38. Sebastian Grey.
The worrds rang like a miserable moan in her head. On the list of men she ought not to be kissing, he had to rank at the top, along with the King, Lord Liverpool, and the chimney sweep.
Julia Quinn
#39. Now I am old-fashioned. A woman, I consider, should be womanly. I have no patience with the modern neurotic girl who jazzes from morning to night, smokes like a chimney, and uses language which would make a billingsgate fishwoman blush!
Agatha Christie
#40. What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?
Diane Setterfield
#41. Smoke rose straight up from the chimney, as if the house raised its hand. As if the house knew the answer.
Sere Prince Halverson
#42. Deviants and monsters ran the camps where families were sent up the chimney or turned into bars of soap, but they would have been powerless without the clerks who sat anonymously behind typewriters and gave them bureaucratic legitimacy.
James Lee Burke
#43. Accurately recalling an entire day of fishing is like trying to push smoke back down a chimney, so you settle on these specific moments.
John Gierach
#44. Men lived among mighty mountains and eternal forests for ages before they realized that they were poetical; it may reasonably be inferred that some of our descendants may see the chimney-pots as rich a purple as the mountain-peaks, and find the lamp-posts as old and natural as the trees.
G.K. Chesterton
#46. Fear no more the heat o' the sun
Nor the furious winter's rages,
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must
As chimney sweepers come to dust
Pierce Brown
#47. She's saying Santa Claus doesn't come to our house."
Celia tensed a bit, realizing he had been listening. "He can."
"No, he can't."
"We have a chimney."
"If something comes down my chimney, I'm shooting it ... especially a fat man wearing a suit.
J.M. Darhower
#48. With a tale, forsooth, he cometh unto you; with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner.
Philip Sidney
#49. ..When I walk across my living room from my chimney to my window, it takes me 10 seconds, but for a bird it takes one second, and for oxygen zero seconds!
Jean-Claude Van Damme
#50. All this while the little panel of pine wood remained over the chimney in the mill-kitchen with the cuckoo clock and the waxen Calvary, and sometimes it seemed to Nello a little hard that whilst his gift was accepted he himself should be denied.
Ouida
#51. After luncheon, accordingly, when the other two had settled themselves into the chimney-corner and had started a heated argument on the subject of EELS,
Kenneth Grahame
#52. The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.
G.K. Chesterton
#53. We are constituted a good deal like chickens, which, taken from the hen, and put in a basket of cotton in the chimney-corner, willoften peep till they die, nevertheless; but if you put in a book, or anything heavy, which will press down the cotton, and feel like the hen, they go to sleep directly.
Henry David Thoreau
#54. So what do you want? Does what happens inside show on the outside? There is such a great fire in one's soul, and yet nobody ever comes to warm themselves there, and passersby see nothing but a little smoke coming from the top of the chimney, and go on their way.
Vincent Van Gogh
#55. Horror. Horrible. The things people do these days to disrespect the dead are just awful. So we're going to respect my dead friend properly." "By stuffing the chimney full of fireworks." "By stuffing the chimney full of fireworks!" She agrees.
Sara Wolf
#56. But, dear, if he got lost, how would we ever explain to his aunt and uncle?" "They wouldn't mind," Harry reassured her. "Dudley would think it was a brilliant joke if I got lost up a chimney, don't worry about that -
J.K. Rowling
#57. Through the station went a goods train, spitting sparks from its chimney. Viktoria stood at the window and combed those sparks out of her hair.
Bohumil Hrabal
#58. He threw a fireball at me. I threw a chimney stack at him - that's the London way.
Ben Aaronovitch
#59. A Mocking Bird regularly resorts to the south angle of a chimney top and salutes us with sweetest notes from the rising of the moon until about midnight.
John James Audubon
#60. If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#61. But my absolute favorite was when you said I was the Santa Claus Magic Mike, and I could bring my presents down your chimney all year round." I
Tijan
#62. Some critics are like chimney-sweepers; they put out the fire below, and frighten the swallows from their nests above; they scrape a long time in the chimney, cover themselves with soot, and bring nothing away but a bag of cinders, and then sing from the top of the house as if they had built it.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#63. Back up shall we? When my brother, the crazy chicken warrior, turned into a falcon and went up the pyramid's chimney with his new friend, the fruit bat, he left me playing nurse to two very wounded people - which I didn't appreciate, and which I wasn't particularly good at.
Rick Riordan
#64. 'The Chimney Sweeper's Boy' began differently from any previous book I'd written. It actually derives from a story a friend - the novel's dedicatee, Patrick Maher - told me.
Ruth Rendell
#65. Smoke poured from every chimney, for the day was cold. The thought of all those coal-grates and wood-stoves made me wary of fire, for these buildings were little more than tinder and brown paper, putting on airs of architecture.
Robert Charles Wilson
#66. The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.
Clement Clarke Moore
#67. Personally, I think that the concept of an old white guy with a beard in a red coat coming down a chimney in the middle of the night or a fairy with a tooth fetish sliding things under my pillow while I sleep would be way freakier, but no, for kids it's monsters. Monsters
Jim Gaffigan
#68. Almost every labourer has his Sunday suit, very often really good clothes, sometimes glossy black, with the regulation 'chimney pot'. His unfortunate walk betrays him, dress how he will.
Richard Jefferies
#69. The chimney is to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground, and rising through the house to the heavens; evenafter the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent.
Henry David Thoreau
#70. Praise
the invisible sun burning beyond
the white cold sky, giving us
light and the chimney's shadow.
Denise Levertov
#71. He had never spoken to Uncle Richard, but he knew that he was a radiologist who put tubes into people's groins and pushed them up into their brains to clear blockages like chimney sweeps did and this was a glorious idea.
Mark Haddon
#72. No organist played a Magnificat but the wind in the flue chimney, no choir sang a Nunc Dimittis but the wuthering gulls, yet I fancy the Creator was not displeazed.
David Mitchell
#73. He looked at the daylight shadows of a yellow hue, dancing with the firelight shadows in blue on the whitewashed chimney corner, but there was nothing in shadows.
Thomas Hardy
#74. Been having a fight with your blankets, Septimus?" A familiar voice echoed down the chimney. "Looks like you lost," the voice continued with a chuckle. "Not wise to take on a pair of blankets, lad. One, maybe, but two blankets always gang up on you. Vicious things, blankets.
Angie Sage
#75. She'd become a governess. It was one of the few jobs a known lady could do.
And she'd taken to it well. She'd sworn that if she did indeed ever find
herself dancing on rooftops with chimney sweeps she'd beat herself to death with her own umbrella.
Terry Pratchett
#76. It is one thing to deceive a king, and quite another to hide from the cricket in the rushes and the little bird in the chimney.
George R R Martin
#77. Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions.
Storm Jameson
#78. If you cannot avoid a quarrel with a blackguard, let your lawyer manage it, rather than yourself. No man sweeps his own chimney, but employs a chimney-sweeper, who has no objection to dirty work, because it is his trade.
Charles Caleb Colton
#79. Let the letters clash forming an invisible meaning of a sunny night, freezing chimney, and silent screams. When words betray you, hold on to your imagination.
Mona Naqi
#80. Stud," D repeated, growly and low. Jack snorted. "You got a better word for a guy who's swept my chimney five times in one night?
Jane Seville
#81. I was lookin' high an' low for them Reds everywhere, I was lookin' in the sink an' underneath the chair. I looked way up my chimney hole, I even looked deep inside my toilet bowl.
Bob Dylan
#82. Sitting by the chimney corner as we grow old, the commonest things around us take on live meanings and hint at the difference between these driving times and the calm, slow moving days when we were young.
Rebecca Harding Davis
#84. The Easter Bunny could have come down the chimney armed with machine guns and opened fire on the house, and everyone would have been less surprised.
Kelly Oram
#85. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. Only after death, only in solitude, does a man's true nature emerge. In death, as on the chimney sweep's Saturday night, the soot gets washed from his body.
Franz Kafka
#86. What is red, white and black all over and says "Ho! Ho!"? Santa Claus after he has came down the chimney.
Beverly Adams
#87. Because obviously the Tooth Fairy doesn't exist. If only life were that great
instead of burnt flesh and turning into ash we had money-giving fairies, bunnies laying pink eggs, and fat men coming down my chimney bearing presents ...
Christina Channelle
#88. P.S. If it's not a secret, will you tell me how you got my dollhouse inside our living room last Christmas? I know its too big to fit down the chimney. I measured.
Joanne Fluke
#89. Almost any house, caught unexpectedly or at an odd angle, can turn a deeply humorous look on a watching person; even a mischievous little chimney, or a dormer like a dimple, can catch up a beholder with a sense of fellowship; but a house arrogant and hating, never off guard, can only be evil.
Shirley Jackson
#90. I can fly around the world in one night. I can wink and go up a chimney in a split second. I can be in 500 shopping malls on the same weekend. I can even fit enough gifts for the entire world into one tiny sleigh pulled by eight tiny reindeer, but I CANNOT FIX THIS CONFOUNDED COMPUTER!
Bobbi A. Chukran
#91. Smoke like a chimney, work like a horse, eat without thinking, go for a walk only in really pleasant company.
Albert Einstein
#92. I got a flue shot and now my chimney works perfectly.
Steve Martin
#93. I work in my attic, and the view is next door's chimney stack.
Malorie Blackman
#94. A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look.
John Updike
#95. Somewhere above this foul temple, crows danced with sparks above the mouth of a chimney, virtually unseen in the darkness. Each one carried a word, but the sparks were deaf. Too busy with the ecstasy of their own bright, blinding fire. At least, until they went out.
Steven Erikson
#96. It's understandable that people are keeping one eye on the pot and another up the chimney.
Kevin Keegan
#98. No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?
Bertrand Russell
#99. Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney and then go on their way.
Vincent Van Gogh
#100. It is far more probable that our senses should deceive us, than that an old woman should be carried up a chimney on a broom stick; and that it is far less astonishing that witnesses should lie, than that witches should perform the acts that were alleged.
Michel De Montaigne
