Top 71 Untidy Quotes
#1. But the people are ungrammatical, untidy, and their sins gaunt and ill-bred.
Walt Whitman
#2. Ruth thought of a novel as a great, untidy house, a disorderly mansion; her job was to make the place fit to live in, to give it at least the semblance of order. Only when she wrote was she unafraid.
John Irving
#3. A laboratory had been fitted up, army classes were instituted; they all said the character of the school was changing. And heaven only knew what further projects Mr. Perkins turned in that untidy head of his.
W. Somerset Maugham
#4. What primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#5. The only time I ever saw him untidy was after a fight. What a sight that was. James Bond run through a blender. You know the other fella probably got off worse.
Esi Edugyan
#6. We never set eyes on Fatima or our dog or the city we had known ever again. Like a body prematurely buried, unmourned withpot coffin or ceremony, our hasty untidy exit from Jerusalem was no way to have said goodbye to our home, our country and all that we knew and loved.
Ghada Karmi
#7. I'm quite an untidy person in a lot of ways. But order makes me happy. I have to have a clear desk and a tidy desktop, with as few visual distractions as possible. I don't mind sound distractions, but visual ones freak me out.
Joanne Harris
#8. Sherlock Holmes gets to be brilliant, solitary, abrasive, Bohemian, whimsical, brave, sad, manipulative, neurotic, vain, untidy, fastidious, artistic, courteous, rude, a polymath genius. Female characters get to be Strong.
Sophia McDougall
#9. I dislike untidy wars, as I dislike untidy peacemaking.
Dorothy Dunnett
#10. Some of the most untidy writers have also been the most productive. Iris Murdoch, for instance, wrote a good 30 books in a house strewn with rubbish.
Craig Brown
#11. There was something rather blousy about roses in full bloom, something shallow and raucous, like women with untidy hair
Daphne Du Maurier
#12. I am violently untidy. My desk is overcrowded. I write my first drafts in longhand in a long notebook using a plastic throwaway fountain pen. Then I work on a word processor using a different desk and a different room.
Colm Toibin
#13. The thing with me is, I'm both untidy and I hate mess. But I'm not untidy in communal spaces, like living rooms. My bedroom is havoc.
Alison Moyet
#14. [B]eing the member of the church means belonging to a messed-up group, an untidy gathering of people like you or me who continually fail to live up to the ideal. But we keep coming just for that reason; we need the help and forgiveness that flow from the offering of Christ.
Don Talafous
#16. I do not much care for nature, and believe that flowers belong in vases rather than loose and untidy on the ground.
Gore Vidal
#17. Our memories and events in our lives are untidy things. We wish that we can file them away and shut the door, or wish the opposite - that they would stay forever.
Deb Caletti
#18. My mind is not like a neat and tidy garden; it is a vast and untidy wilderness, full of irrelevancies, but with lots of places to wander and get lost.
Roopa Farooki
#19. [B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
Alan Bennett
#20. The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.
John Galsworthy
#21. Finally, I'd like to thank my readers for staying with me all these years. I especially want to thank the ones who understand that the world isn't made up of happy endings, but messy, complicated, and untidy ones.
Lisa Lutz
#22. Remind me again why I put up with you?
'Cause you sold me your soul for five bucks, and now you must submit to my will?' I still had the sheet of paper, written in his untidy fifth-grade scrawl. Gideon David Belmonte. One soul.
Bethany Frenette
#23. The whole point is that writing has a pattern and life hasn't. Life is so untidy. Art is so short and life so long. It is not possible to have perfection in life but it is possible to have perfection in a novel.
Elizabeth Taylor
#24. I dislike the dead returning to life," said Etienne, his shoulders slumping again. "It's untidy and inappropriate.
Seanan McGuire
#25. You have the most revolting Florence Nightingale complex,' said Mrs. Smiling.
It is not that at all, and well you know it. On the whole, I dislike my fellow beings; I find them so difficult to understand. But I have a tidy mind and untidy lives irritate me. Also, they are uncivilized.
Stella Gibbons
#26. Your hair may be brushed, but your mind's untidy. You've had about seven hours of sleep since Friday. No wonder you feel that lost sensation. You're sunk from a riot of relaxation.
Ogden Nash
#27. She was a pretty girl, with a pointed face and blue-black hair. But she was an untidy, a dusty sort of girl, and you felt that in a few years something might go wrong; she might get swollen ankles or grow a mustache.
Mavis Gallant
#28. He gave me a severe look over his spectacles and said, as if he thought the words were deadly venom and might kill me, You are an untidy person.
Jim Butcher
#29. The house was safe again, although a little bit more untidy, but at least Vluffy didn't have to worry about big nasty two headed roaches chasing him down the hall anymore.
Christina Engela
#30. She looked around at the close confines of the NCD offices. They were cramped and untidy. No. They were worse than that. They had gone through cramped and untidy, paused briefly at small and shabby before ending up at pokey and damp.
Jasper Fforde
#31. Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.
Donald Rumsfeld
#32. From where you sit, the White House may look as untidy as the inside of a stomach. As is said of the legislative process, sausage-making and policy-making shouldn't be seen close-up. Don't let that panic you. Things may be going better than they look from the inside.
Donald Rumsfeld
#33. I'm a little untidy, and my favorite color is gray, and I'm always scurrying around in a panic.
Olesya Rulin
#34. Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat raggedly on into the future ...
Simon Schama
#36. Nature is all very well in her place, but she must not be allowed to make things untidy.
Stella Gibbons
#37. She just waited. Rosie had no choice. She'd have to do it on her own. She'd do anything for Amy, even hear whatever she was about to hear, on her own. The consultant was in his office. It was as untidy as always. He didn't smile. It wasn't a bad sign. He
Monica McInerney
#38. He did not arrive at this conclusion by the decent process of quiet, logical deduction, nor yet by the blinding flash of glorious intuition, but by the shoddy, untidy process halfway between the two by which one usually gets to know things.
Margery Allingham
#39. It is often said that the Japanese are extremely clean at home, or inside any house or office, but dirty and untidy outside. 'Go and look at a railway station,' I was told, 'and you'll be horrified.' I went and was horrified; horrified by the cleanliness of the place.
George Mikes
#40. Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life
W. H. Auden
#41. I'm quite contradictory - a bit OCD, but quite untidy. I have piles of stuff everywhere, but they make sense to me. And I'll find the one thing in the room that's my boyfriend's, and complain about him leaving it out.
Kimberley Nixon
#42. The forest in front of me is organic and untidy and in need of a serious manicure. The British would never keep their forest in such a sorry state, all overgrown and smelling of rot.
Sarah Noffke
#44. Really was the most tactless person upon earth, - a fluffy, feathery, untidy cockatoo of a man, perfectly good-natured, but absolutely centered upon his own silly self.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#45. If you did not keep your yard in reasonable order, then your whole life would be similarly untidy. A messy yard told Mma Ramotswe everything she needed to know about its owner.
Alexander McCall Smith
#46. Sarah had no intention of having nannies or anything like that. Her mother had sighed a bit, and said vaguely: 'I always find women who look after their own children get rather untidy and disorganised. Husbands hate it too'. Sometimes Sarah wanted to slap her face.
Josa Young
#47. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
Alan Bennett
#48. Then there was silence, the air like ice. Brittle-looking birch trees with black marks on their white bark, and some kind of small untidy evergreens rolled up like sleepy bears. The frozen lake not level but mounded along the shore, as if the waves had turned to ice in the act of falling.
Alice Munro
#49. Life itself is a haphazard, untidy, messy affair.
Dorothy Day
#50. The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it. They'll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it when the time comes, don't you worry.
C.S. Lewis
#51. I always really liked magicians. I'm not even sure why - except that they know things other people don't, and they live in untidy rooms full of strange objects.
Susanna Clarke
#52. There was this about vampires : they could never look scruffy. Instead, they were ... what was the word ... deshabille. It meant untidy, but with bags and bags of style.
Terry Pratchett
#53. Things were a little untidy, but what did that matter? It was possible to become the slave of things; possible to miss life in preparation for living.
Elizabeth Von Arnim
#54. Do not make yourself the subject of remarks either by being overdressed or by dressing in a lax, untidy manner. Act as though you knew that the eye of heaven is upon you, and that you are living under the approbation or disapprobation of God.
Ellen G. White
#55. A film with an untidy plot cannot grip the audience and define their emotional response.
Kim Jong Il
#57. An untidy, badly run house will ruin any marriage and is a disgrace to any intelligent woman.
Rose Henniker Heaton
#58. My hair is an untidy bob. I am very dark, but I embellish the roots because I am white in one clump.
Erin O'Connor
#59. The front room of his house was what I called 'untidy chic'. Prefects weren't subject to the same Rules on room tidiness, but since no one really enjoyed clutter, a certain style of ordered untidiness was generally considered de couleur for a prefect's room.
Jasper Fforde
#60. Anything else?" "He was a man of untidy habits - very untidy and careless. He was left with
Arthur Conan Doyle
#61. Untrained minds have always been a nuisance to the military police of orthodoxy. God-intoxicated mystics and untidy saints with only a white blaze of divine love where their minds should have been, are perpetually creating almost as much disorder within the law as outside it.
Katherine Anne Porter
#62. In a book, all would have gone according to plan ... but life was so fucking untidy - what could you say for an existence where some of the most crucial conversations of your life took place when you needed to take a shit, or something? An existence where there weren't even any chapters?
Stephen King
#63. Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.
Mary Oliver
#64. Certainly no one on-site asked for my opinion, but I have always felt there should be no leftovers. It's untidy, and it shows a lack of a real workmanlike spirit.
Jeff Lindsay
#65. Those who write them do," Ferus said. "They leave bits and pieces behind them when they lay down the words, some scraps and smears of their essential nature." He sniffed. "Most untidy, really - but assemble enough scraps and one might have something approaching a whole.
Jim Butcher
#67. To be stupid was one thing; to be stupid and evil yielded up untidy consequences.
Gail Carriger
#69. She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy.
Oscar Wilde
#70. A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world
and the responsibilities of your life.
Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.
In the glare of your mind, be modest.
And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.
Mary Oliver
#71. He didn't look as if he'd been through a whirlwind exactly but he'd certainly endured a stiff breeze.
Sara Sheridan
