Quotes About Old Houses

#1. I've always thought that old clothes are a lot like old houses; they bring the past and present together.

Karen White

#2. I love antique architecture, so if I have any indulgences, I have owned and renovated and reconstructed a lot of old houses.

Daryl Hall

#3. 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

#4. Old houses, I thought, do not belong to people ever, not really, people belong to them.

Gladys Taber

#5. The cellar itself? Not shown. Probably wanna check that out." "The cellar," I said. "Great. Because nothing bad ever happens in the cellars of creepy old houses.

Craig Schaefer

#6. One spring afternoon as a child in the strange town of Portland, I walked down to a different street corner, and saw a row of old houses, huddled together like seals on a rock.

Richard Brautigan

#7. Old houses were scaffolding once and workmen whistling.

T. E. Hulme

#8. I like old people when they have aged well. And old houses with an accumulation of sweet honest living in them are good. And the timelessness that only the passing of Time itself can give to objects both inside and outside the spirit is a continuing reassurance.

M.F.K. Fisher

#9. Hill House has an impressive list of tragedies connected with it, but then, most old houses have. People have to live and die somewhere, after all, and a house can hardly stand for eighty years without seeing some of its inhabitants dies within its walls.

Shirley Jackson

#10. Some places speak distinctly. Certain dark gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck.

Robert Louis Stevenson

#11. He led me out of that tangle of alleys in another direction, it seems, for when we sighted a lamp-post we were in a half-familiar street with monotonous rows of mingled tenement blocks and old houses. Charter Street, it turned out to be, but I was too flustered to notice just where we hit

H.P. Lovecraft

#12. Old houses mended, Cost little less than new before they're ended.

Colley Cibber

#13. These old houses are only brick and wood, soaked in human sweat, grained with human dirt.

Virginia Woolf

#14. Famous old houses seem to have an intuitive perception of the value of corner lots. If it is a possible thing, they always set themselves down on the most desirable spots.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

#15. If you go to old houses on Long Island you will see painted Chinese wallpaper, which was big in the 18th century. Throughout history, notable, established families have always tried to link to the 18th century.

Catherine Martin

#16. All the old houses that I knew when I was a child were full of books, bought generation after generation by members of the family. Everyone was literate as a matter of course. Nobody told you to read this or not to read that. It was there to read, and we read.

Katherine Ann Porter

#17. One of my weekend hobbies is to go look at old houses when there are open houses around here. Just to go look at the architecture. And you can see how many houses were built around 1977, the year where everyone said, "Let's put in these aluminum windows instead of beautiful hand-made wood ones."

Daniel Clowes

#18. The house in the story is based on my friend Tori's house in Kinsale, Ireland, which is obviously not actually haunted, and the sound of people upstairs moving wardrobes around when you are downstairs there and alone is probably just something that old houses do when they think they are unobserved.

Neil Gaiman

#19. For example, lead paint in old houses can be a greater threat to children's health than lead that may be under some industrial site where there are no children.

Fred Thompson

#20. Larry said that Michelangelo was a poof, so I wondered why he'd sculpted a guy with a really tiny cock. But I know when you go to old houses, the doorways are much smaller, 'cause people were shorter then, so maybe cocks were smaller too. It makes me glad I wasn't born a few centuries ago.

J.L. Merrow

#21. You see, Frank found out the hard way that the dark things lurking in the night don't haunt old houses or abandoned ships. They haunt minds.

David Wong

#22. Old houses are full with memories and that's why they resist to collapse!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#23. People would have to learn to deal with old monsters again. Stay in their houses. Shutter their windows.

Erin Kellison

#24. If this place were closer to Terra there'd be empty beer cans and plastic plates strewn around. The trees would be gone. There'd be old jet motors in the water. The beaches would stink to high heaven. Terran Development would have a couple of million little plastic houses set up everywhere.

Philip K. Dick

#25. We wander through old streets, and pause before the age stricken houses; and, strange to say, the magic past lights them up.

Grace King

#26. Why do these big old country houses always have family portraits in the dining room? Do you really want to eat with someone's gloomy great-grandfather looking down on you?

Elizabeth Jane Howard

#27. How to save the old that's worth saving, whether in landscape, houses, manners, institutions, or human types, is one of our greatest problems, and the one that we bother least about.

John Galsworthy

#28. like the small votives they lit in church.) Sometimes the houses were deserted, even partially destroyed. Sometimes it seemed the families must still be upstairs. There were old bicycles in some, or baby carriages. A steamer trunk, once, filled with broken dishes. A jar of pickled cauliflower.

Alice McDermott

#29. I was only allowed only to watch public television until I was 12 years old. I would come home from friends's houses with a list of demands. 'OK, We have all the wrong cereals. You guys are asleep on the job.'

Allison Williams

#30. At the end of your life you will probably end up in an old-age home, or in a back room in one of your children's houses, left only with a handful of fading memories and a body racked with great pain and suffering.

Frederick Lenz

#31. An old house that had lived its life long ago and so was very quiet and wise and a little mysterious. Also a little austere, but very kind.

L.M. Montgomery

#32. Us comics guys tend to get really good at the things we draw a lot. I'm good at creepy old forests, Victorian houses, underground goblin cities, and beautiful but creepy fairies.

Ted Naifeh

#33. My biggest extravagances are also investments. I have several houses in California, a house in Nashville, an office complex, and I bought the old home place in Tennessee. They are different places for me to write, but I can turn right around and sell them.

Dolly Parton

#34. In my heart, I'm just a kid from the council houses. I can remember the old cottage and my dad coming round with the tin bath. I'm not a rich man.

Terry Pratchett

#35. The BBC is a perfect example of uncontrolled growth, [occupying] old churches and manor houses, the old Langham Hotel where Sherlock Holmes once met Moriarty and where this correspondent once shared an office with an 8-foot bathtub.

Morley Safer

#36. Martha Stewart has two houses in East Hampton. She has an old fashioned Victorian house and a very new modern house.

Steven Gaines

#37. I was thinking", he answered absently, "about Euripides; how, when he was an old man, he went and lived in a cave by the sea, and it was thought queer at the time. It seems that houses had become insupportable to him. I wonder whether it was because he had observed women so closely all his life.

Willa Cather

#38. Familiarity breeds attempt. Time wounds all heels. I went down on the Lower East Side today and saw all those Old Testament houses. We're all cremated equal. We're insufferable friends. I've been working my head to the bone.

Goodman Ace

#39. I began playing Monopoly for real when I was 26 years old. Today, my wife and I have approximately 1,400 little green houses - each paying us monthly. You do not have to be a rocket scientist or have a Harvard degree to play Monopoly for real.

Robert Kiyosaki

#40. When I was a young mother at home with a two year old and a five year old, living on the Eastside in one of those neighborhoods where all the houses look the same, where all the cars look the same and the lawns look the same, I was writing in secret.

Deb Caletti

#41. I'm very stodgy. I'm always looking at old photos of California and Los Angeles, knowing that what I'm looking at is now full of houses. There used to be vacant lots in Los Angeles, now all taken up by three-storey boxes - it's all getting infilled.

Edward Ruscha

#42. Old Filey lies around the Ravine, a glacial gash running down to Coble Landing. This is the fishing Filey of centuries past, with neat little terraced cottages and a cluster of attractive 18th century houses.

David Hewson

#43. Neighborhood grocery stores, coal yards, gas stations, cheap taverns, big old rundown houses, a few churches with blank embarrassed faces.

Ross Macdonald

#44. That's the depressing part of places like this. Guest houses run by broken-down gentlepeople. They're full of failures - of people who have never got anywhere and never will get anywhere, of people who - who have been defeated and broken by life, of people who are old and tired and finished.

Agatha Christie

#45. Kings made tombs more splendid than houses of the living, and counted old names in the rolls of their descent dearer than the names of sons. Childless

J.R.R. Tolkien

#46. Big lots,' I said, seeing the eighty-year-old oaks and shady lawns. The houses were set way back and had iron fences and stone drives.
The harder to hear your neighbors scream, my dear,' was David's answer, and I sent my head up and down in agreement.

Kim Harrison

#47. I think houses live their own lives along a time-stream that's different from the ones upon which their owners float, one that's slower. In a house, especially an old one, the past is closer.

Stephen King

#48. Five houses?" Lothaire had sneered, cutting Trehan off. "You all live under one roof now. Mine. Because I'm the king of the castle." Then his red eyes had grown vacant, and he'd begun muttering about "Lizvetta's lingerie."
Trehan had been ... underwhelmed by the Enemy of Old's attention span.

Kresley Cole

#49. He sat in the same place as the day died, looking at the dull houses opposite, and thinking, if the disembodied spirits of former inhabitants were ever conscious of them, how they must pity themselves for their old places of imprisonment.

Charles Dickens

#50. There are so many ways to make a living that don't involve hiding in bushes opposite houses of 18-year-old girls with a camera in your hand.

Jamie Dornan

#51. Someone was always leaving
and never coming back.
The wooden houses wait like old wives
along this road; they are everywhere,
abandoned, leaning, turning gray.

Lisel Mueller

#52. Just as the light and weightless vegetation of saltpeter floats over the old walls of houses as soon as the owner gets careless, so the literary vocation springs up in you.

Federico Garcia Lorca

#53. It always seems to be cool in the houses of old people, have you noticed?

Stephen King

#54. You know, in the old days, you might be able to slowly sort of build an audience for your work by publishing two, three novels before you hit it big. You know, now, there's much more of an emphasis in the publishing houses on making sure that every book makes money.

Chad Harbach

#55. The map we made of the 3,000-year-old city of Tanis requires no imagination. It has buildings, streets, admin complexes, houses - clear as day.

Sarah Parcak

#56. In old grimy streets, in isolated and decaying houses, sometimes far from the Vieux Carre, in little used and secluded cemeteries, there still sluggishly circulates the ebbing blood of the past, of a vigorous and vividly hued past.

Clarence John Laughlin

#57. I've always been fascinated by numbers. Before I was seventeen years old, I had lived in twenty-one different houses. In my mind, each of those houses had a number.

Robert Indiana

#58. The Japanese think it strange we paint our old wooden houses when it takes so long to find the wabi in them. They prefer the bonsai tree after the valiant blossoming is over, the leaves fallen. When bareness reveals a merit born in the vegetable struggling.

Jack Gilbert

#59. The healers' university looked exactly as Tessia had imagined. Her father had described it as an 'old but strange building that has adopted and absorbed surrounding houses as opportunity and funds allowed'. It sounded confusing and intriguing, and it was.

Trudi Canavan

#60. Why, they're the dirtiest guys in any town. They're the same ones that burned the houses of old German people during the war. They're the same ones that lynch Negroes. They like to be cruel. They like to hurt people, and they always give it a nice name, patriotism or protecting the constitution.

John Steinbeck

#61. I call it an old-fashioned seafood house for the new millennium. We are trying to update what we know as old fish houses and places like that, which are great, but I want to give it a new, fresh look with updated versions of the classics we all love.

Todd English

#62. Bob [Sachs] is not the only client who wants a more finished look. People from out of state still see the 'Old West,' mining-camp look as new and exciting, but most don't want splinters [from unfinished wood] in their houses. The taste is more grown-up.

John Shirley

#63. Heaven and Earth are meeting in a storm that, when it's over, will leave the air purer and the leaves fertile, but before that happens, houses will be destroyed, centuries- old trees will topple, paradises will be flooded.

Paulo Coelho

#64. It was very clear that this was a very, very old site. There were remains of sod walls. Fishermen assumed it was an old Indian site. Bu Indians didn't use that kind of buildings and houses.

Helge Ingstad

#65. My dad had to work for everything in his life; so did my mum: she cleaned people's houses and looked after old people. You can be complacent and sit on the couch and complain about the dreams that you missed. Get off the couch!

Sam Worthington

#66. This is the old part of Tehran, with small spice shops, dusty narrow alleys with dry streams winding into houses with tall protective walls.

Azar Nafisi

#67. Calvin Klein and Donna Karan were the big American names at that point in time, Helmut [Lung] was the cool kid on the block and you had Marc Jacobs and John Galliano who starting the revival of the old fashion houses.

Roopal Patel

#68. The natural end of an era, as designers whose houses bear their names grow old and pass away, combined with the arrival of digital cameras and Internet exposure, has created a perfect storm.

Suzy Menkes

#69. We have a maxim in the House of Commons, and written on the walls of our houses, that old ways are the safest and surest ways.

Edward Coke

#70. There were other houses that always brought images of an orderly life, kitchens with plain sideboards, old windows, the comforts of marriage in their common form, which at times surpassed everything - breakfast in the morning, conversations, late hours, and nothing that suggested excess or decay.

James Salter

#71. And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#72. Old beach houses sometimes don't have TVs, or you don't get cellphone reception.

Jim Rash

#73. A new disease? I know not, new or old, but it may well be called poor mortals plague for, like a pestilence, it doth infect the houses of the brain till not a thought, or motion, in the mind, be free from the black poison of suspect.

Ben Jonson

#74. The old Wall Street adage "never invest in anything that eats or needs repairs" may apply to racehorses, but it's malarkey when it comes to houses.

Peter Lynch

#75. When I was 6 years old, I was in a rock band that was horrible called 'Dead End.' The name kind of described us. People liked us; we would go and perform at coffee houses and stuff.

Aaron Carter

#76. I love anything old. I love to travel and especially like to visit the places where my books are set. My husband and I often stay in out-of-the-way inns and houses built in times past. It's fun and it gives a wonderful sense of a by-gone era.

Kat Martin

#77. I could go to a dozen houses, scrape away the dirt, and find his footprints, but my own prints evaporated before I ever looked back.

Brenda Sutton Rose