Cottage Quotes

Just when I despaired -- she was there, filling me as a melody fills a cottage. I was with her, running beside the Acis when we were a child. I knew the ancient villa moated by a dark lake, the view through the dusty windows of the belvedere, and the secret space in the odd angle between two rooms where we sat at noon to read by candlelight. I knew the life of the Autarch's court, where poison waited in a diamond cup. I learned what it was for one who had never seen a cell or felt a whip to be a prisoner of the torturers, what dying meant, and death.

I learned that I had been more to her than I had ever guessed, and at last fell into a sleep in which my dreams were all of her. Not memories merely -- memories I had possessed in plenty before. I held her poor, cold hands in mine, and I no longer wore the rags of an apprentice, nor the fuligin of a journeyman. We were one, naked and happy and clean, and we knew that she was no more and that I still lived, and we struggled against neither of those things, but with woven hair read from a single book and talked and sang of other matters. ~ Gene Wolfe

The next day, the cycle starts again. We're set out like decorative plates in this cavernous architecture, and such a craggy dining hall it is. Not exactly a Claude Monet cottage, more of a Medieval bastion - a vestige of Roman conquests. It still moans with the rickety sounds of age. I can almost hear the grumblings of ancient inhabitants. ~ Michael Ben Zehabe

I'll keep it," she said. "Then, when you get back, after you and the dark one are done making out and planning a future filled with blond-haired, green-eyed, pigment-challeneged rug rats, I'll bring it over and you can add it to your scrapbook, right before you start cooking me dinner. I like vegetarian lasagna with cottage cheese instead of ricotta."
"Gwen?"
"And don't forget the mushrooms. Garlic bread, too, please. That is, as long as your vampire lover doesn't object."
"I want to say thank you," Isobel said. "For ... everything."
"No," Gwen said. "Thank you for the delicious dinner. I can almost taste the baklava you and Darth Vader will be making for dessert. Something tells me you're gonna have to look that one up, though. ~ Kelly Creagh

To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese. ~ Tom Robbins

Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be. Mr. Prosser wanted to be at point D. Point D wasn't anywhere in particular, it was just any convenient point a very long way from points A, B and C. He would have a nice little cottage at point D, with axes over the door, and spend a pleasant amount of time at point E, which would be the nearest pub to point D. His wife of course wanted climbing roses, but he wanted axes. He didn't know why - he just liked axes. He flushed hotly under the derisive grins of the bulldozer drivers. ~ Douglas Adams

Love and a cottage! Eh, Fanny! Ah, give me indifference and a coach and six! ~ George Colman The Elder

He stood beside a cottage lone
And listened to a lute,
One summer's eve, when the breeze was gone,
And the nightingale was mute. ~ Thomas Kibble Hervey

In a cottage deep in the forest lived the wicked old witch ... it was a cottage out of the nastier kind of fairy tale ~ Terry Pratchett

Once, as I passed by a cottage, there came out a lovely fairy child, with two wondrous toys, one in each hand. The one was the tube through which the fairy-gifted poet looks when he beholds the same thing everywhere; the other that through which he looks when he combines into new forms of loveliness those images of beauty which his own choice has gathered from all regions wherein he has travelled. Round the child's head was an aureole of emanating rays. As I looked at him in wonder and delight, round crept from behind me the something dark, and the child stood in my shadow. Straightway he was a commonplace boy, with a rough broad-brimmed straw hat, through which brim the sun shone from behind. The toys he carried were a multiplying-glass and a kaleidoscope. I sighed and departed. ~ George MacDonald

This is being written in another seaside cottage on another coast. Gin and whiskey have bitten rings in the table where I sit. ~ John Cheever

Lights went on in the cottage, lending it an undeniably warm glow. He smiled, amused as he recalled his Snow White references where Leilani was concerned. "Of course she lives in a cottage," he murmured. "All she needs now are the dwarves." With all the comings and goings at the shop, which he'd spotted through the trailer blinds as he'd labored through his various meetings with Rosemary and the crew, Leilani did indeed seem to be recruiting her own miniature army. ~ Donna Kauffman

A marriage was like a house under constant construction, each year seeing the completion of new rooms. A first-year marriage was a cottage; one that had gone on for twenty-seven years was a huge and rambling mansion. There were bound to be crannies and storage spaces, most of them dusty and abandoned, some containing a few unpleasant relics you would just as soon you hadn't found. But that was no biggie. You either threw those relics out or took them to Goodwill. ~ Stephen King

Your love in a cottage is hungry,
Your vine is a nest for flies-
Your milkmaid shocks the Graces,
And simplicity talks of pies!
You lie down to your shady slumber
And wake with a bug in your ear,
And your damsel that walks in the morning
Is shod like a mountaineer. ~ Nathaniel Parker Willis

That these mandates exist is hardly news, but their cumulative effect on women's lives tends to be examined through a fragmented lens, one-pathology-at-a-time, the eating disorder lit on the self-help shelves separated from the books on women's troubled relationships with men, the books on compulsive shopping separated from the books on female sexuality, the books on culture and media separated from the books on female psychology. Take your pick, choose your demon: Women Who Love Too Much in one camp, Women Who Eat Too Much in another, Women Who Shop Too Much in a third. In fact, the camps are not so disparate, and the question of appetite - specifically the question of what happens to the female appetite when it's submerged and rerouted - is the thread that binds them together. One woman's tub of cottage cheese is another's maxed-out MasterCard; one woman's soul-murdering love affair is another's frenzied eating binge. ~ Caroline Knapp

In the country neighbor­hood thereabouts, along the dusty roads, one found at intervals the prettiest little cottage homes, snug and cozy, and so cobwebbed with vines snowed thick with roses that the doors and windows were wholly hidden from sight-sign that these were deserted homes, forsaken years ago by defeated and disap­pointed families who could neither sell them nor give them away. ~ Mark Twain

I was born in Darien, Connecticut, but in 1959, when I was four, my parents moved to the suburbs of Toronto. Then, in the late 1960s, they bought a cottage in a resort/trailer park in the Kawarthas region of Ontario, and we moved up there. I wrote a book about it in 2000 called 'Last Resort: Coming of Age in Cottage Country.' ~ Linwood Barclay

In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world. I want to ask you to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

The paralytic on his couch can have if he wants them wider experiences than Stanley slaughtering the savages, the two roomed cottage may enclose an infinitely richer, sweeter domestic harmony than the palace; and the peaceful cotton-spinner win victories beside which those of the reverberating general are dust and ashes -- let us not waster the sacred fire and wear away the tissues in the vulgar pursuit of what others have and we have not; admitting defeat isn't the way to conquer and from every failure imperishable experience survives ~ Alice James

I don't like anything that looks gelatinous - really weirds me out. But when I was a kid, I used to get very, very upset if anything had a kind of chalky texture; like, certain kinds of cottage cheese I know have a weird chalkiness. ~ Roz Chast

I want to make pants out of tuna fish, to accompany my cottage cheese thighs. ~ Jarod Kintz

But if Miss Golightly remained unconscious of my existence, except as a doorbell convenience, I became, through the summer, rather an authority on hers. I discovered, from observing the trash-basket outside her door, that her regular reading consisted of tabloids and travel folders and astrological charts; that she smoked an esoteric cigarette called Picayunes; survived on cottage cheese and Melba Toast; that her vari-colored hair was somewhat self-induced. The same source made it evident that she received V-letters by the bale. They were torn into strips like bookmarks. I used occasionally to pluck myself a bookmark in passing. Remember and miss you and rain and please write and damn and goddamn were the words that recurred most often on these slips; those, and lonesome and love. ~ Truman Capote

Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one's enemies
but not before they have been hanged. ~ Heinrich Heine

Why do you want to know?"
The shrug again. "Just wondering."
"Really. You've skipped your lawn tennis or duck hunting or whiskey drinking or whatever else people of your sort do all day, only to come all the way out to the island to ask me about the piano piece. Because you were just wondering." I pushed away from the door. "Coming here to kiss me would have been more believable."
"Well, it was second on my list."
"I'm not intimidated by you," I said, blunt. "If you're hoping I'll turn out to be some pathetic, blubbering little rag-girl who begs you not to ruin her, you're in for a surprise."
"That's good." Lord Armand met my eyes. "I like surprises."
We gazed at each other, he on the bed and me by the door, neither of us giving quarter. It seemed to me that the room was growing even more dim, that time was repeating the same ploy it had pulled in Jesse's cottage, drawing out long and slow. The storm outside railed against the castle walls, drowning the air within. It layered darkness through Armand's eyes, the once-vivid blue now deep as the ocean at night.
Beyond my window the rain fell and fell, fat clouds weeping as if they'd never stop.
"Nice bracelet," Armand said softly. "Did you steal it?"
I shook my head. "You gave it to me."
"Did I?"
"As far as everyone else if concerned, yes. You did."
"Hmm. And what do I get in return for agreeing to be your…benefactor?"
"The answer to your question."
"No kiss?" ~ Shana Abe

shortly I should be able to live at peace in my cottage, with all the twenty four hours of the day to myself. Forty-six I am, and never yet had a whole week of leisure. What will 'for ever' feel like, and can I use it all? Please note its address from March onwards - Clouds Hill, Moreton, Dorset - and visit it, sometime, if you still stravage the roads of England in a great car. The cottage has two rooms; one, upstairs, for music (a gramophone and records) and one downstairs for books. There is a bath, in a demi-cupboard. For food one goes a mile, to Bovington (near the Tank Corps Depot) and at sleep-time I take my great sleeping bag, embroidered MEUM, and spread it on what seems the nicest bit of floor. There is a second bag, embroidered TUUM, for guests. The cottage looks simple, outside, and does no hurt to its setting which is twenty miles of broken heath and a river valley filled with rhododendrons run wild. I think everything, inside and outside my place, approaches perfection. ~ T.E. Lawrence

Soon the cottage was filled with the familiar, homely smell of frying onions. It escaped from the stove, crept through the kitchen, sniffed along the bottom of the closed front room door and wound its way stealthily up the crooked staircase, even under the door of Anna's bedroom. But even this, the most delicious, hungry-making smell in the world, was unable to rouse her. ~ Joan G. Robinson

The Reverie of Poor Susan
AT the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,
Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years:
Poor Susan has pass'd by the spot, and has heard
In the silence of morning the song of the bird.
'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees
A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.
Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale
Down which she so often has tripp'd with her pail;
And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's,
The one only dwelling on earth that she loves.
She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade,
The mist and the river, the hill and the shade;
The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,
And the colours have all pass'd away from her eyes! ~ William Wordsworth

When Julian arrived at the ladies' cottage, he was nearly struck down by their magnificence. It was one thing to be in the presence of such extraordinary exquisiteness, but to be in that presence and have that presence be one of purity too, well that was otherworldly. But Julian was first and foremost a businessman and as such, he had to put his growing carnal desire aside and focus on the matter at hand. ~ Marie Shore

You choose tools for a task by their crafting, not their look," a crow said crisply from a nearby tree. He flapped over to land on a barrel in front of the cottage. "A smith's finest hammer will be streaked with soot. ~ Tamora Pierce

I bet Mrs Snapperly had no teeth and talked to herself, right?" said Miss Tick.
"Yes. And she had a cat. And a squint," said Tiffany. And then it all came out in a rush: "And so after he vanished, they went to her cottage and they looked in the oven and they dug up her garden and they threw stones at her old cat until it died and they turned her out of her cottage and piled u pall her old books in the middle of the room and set fire to them and burned the place to the ground and everyone said she was an old witch."
"They burned the books," said Miss Tick in a flat voice.
"Because they said they had old writing in them," said Tiffany. "And pictures of stars."
"And when you went to look, did they?" said Miss Tick.
Tiffany suddenly felt cold. "How did you know?" she said.
"I'm good at listening. Well, did they?"
Tiffany sighed. "Yes, I went to the cottage next day, and some of the pages, you know, had kind of floated up in the heat? And I found a part of one, and it had all old lettering and gold and blue edging. And I buried her cat."
"You buried the cat?"
"Yes! Someone had to! ~ Terry Pratchett

The cottage industry of India had to perish in order that Lancashire might flourish. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

He doesn't need my help coming up with pranks. He's got too many ideas of his own.
- Daja referring to Briar in their first year at Discipline cottage ~ Tamora Pierce

Mr Henry Gowan and the dog were established frequenters of the cottage, and the day was fixed for the wedding. There was to be a convocation of Barnacles on the occasion, in order that that very high and very large family might shed as much lustre on the marriage as so dim an event was capable of receiving. To have got the whole Barnacle ~ Charles Dickens

Everybody has heard of the great Heidelberg Tun, and most people have seen it, no doubt. It is a wine-cask as big as a cottage, and some traditions say it holds eighteen hundred thousand bottles, and other traditions say it holds eighteen hundred million barrels. I think it likely that one of these statements is a mistake, and the other is a lie. However, the mere matter of capacity is a thing of no sort of consequence, since the cask is empty, and indeed has always been empty, history says. An empty cask the size of a cathedral could excite but little emotion in me. I do not see any wisdom in building a monster cask to hoard up emptiness in, when you can get a better quality, outside, any day, free of expense. ~ Mark Twain

It was all a cottage is supposed to be, small and snug, with a front porch, pink climbing roses, and lots of trees for shade. ~ Jeanne Birdsall

Tis no use fighting with the lass," Niall said wearily. "You will lose the battle, Gunnolf. No matter what it is about."
Gunnolf shook his head, then helped Niall to stand, and with his arm around his waist, he helped him out of the cottage. "I tell you, she is the one for you. ~ Terry Spear

You're awfully quiet."

Her head snapped the other way, heat creeping up into her cheeks as she focused on the ocean below. "Just waiting for all of this to sink in."

"Oh." He chuckled. "I was hoping you were staring at me because you liked what you saw."

Clio grinned, shaking her head. "I thought you were concentrating on the road."

He pulled into a cobblestone driveway. The truck vibrated as they rumbled over the uneven surface. When he stopped in front of a cottage, he turned off the engine and met her eyes. "I have a hard time concentrating on anything but you when you're around."

Her heart pounded. "No one's ever had that problem around me before."

"I call bullshit." He rolled his eyes. "I've been wishing you'd notice me since the day we met."
Her jaw dropped. "I always notice you. Why do you think I'm at the theater site so often?"

He reached over to run a finger along her jawline. "You're beautiful, Clio. But you're so busy with your books and reading about the past, you must not notice the effect you have on everyone in the present. ~ Lisa Kessler

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself. ~ C.S. Lewis

Still, he never felt that the sermons he wrote at the cottage were good. By the time he got back to Washington to preach them, they no longer excited him. They seemed cold, lifeless. This was probably because Peter's best sermons rose out of the soil of emotion in his own heart. That emotion had to be a present, valid reality. He could not conjure it up. ~ Catherine Marshall

The blindness of bigotry, the madness of ambition, and the miscalculations of diplomacy seek their victims principally amongst the innocent and the unoffending. The cottage is sure to suffer for every error of the court, the cabinet, or the camp. When error sits in the seat of power and of authority, and is generated in high places, it may be compared to that torrent which originates indeed in the mountain, but commits its devastation in the vale. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

Pretty soft!' he cried. 'To have to come and live in New York! To have to leave my little cottage and take a stuffy, smelly, over-heated hole of an apartment in this Heaven-forsaken, festering Gehenna. To have to mix night after night with a mob who think that life is a sort of St Vitus's dance, and imagine that they're having a good time because they're making enough noise for six and drinking too much for ten. I loathe New York, Bertie. I wouldn't come near the place if I hadn't got to see editors occasionally. There's a blight on it. It's got moral delirium tremens. It's the limit. The very thought of staying more than a day in it makes me sick. And you call this thing pretty soft for me!'
I felt rather like Lot's friends must have done when they dropped in for a quiet chat and their genial host began to criticise the Cities of the Plain. I had no idea old Rocky could be so eloquent.
'It would kill me to have to live in New York,' he went on. 'To have to share the air with six million people! TO have to wear stiff collars and decent clothes all the time! To - ' He started. 'Good Lord! I suppose I should have to dress for dinner in the evenings. What a ghastly notion!'
I was shocked, absolutely shocked.
'My dear chap!' I said, reproachfully.
'Do you dress for dinner every night, Bertie?'
'Jeeves,' I said coldly. 'How many suits of evening clothes have we?'
'We have three suits full of evening dress, sir; two dinner jackets- '
'Three.' ~ P.G. Wodehouse

Annie, just once could you not give me a hard time?"
"Maybe someday, but not today."
"Annie, you're making Theo sad." Neither of them realized Livia had been paying attention to them. She peered around Theo's legs. "I think you should tell him your free secret."
"I don't!" She gave Livia a death glare. "And you'd better not, either."
Livia peered up at Theo. "Then you better tell your free secret."
He stiffened. "Annie doesn't want to hear my free secret."
"You have a free secret?" Annie asked.
"Yes, he does." Livia puffed up with four-year-old self-importance. "And I know it."
Now Theo was the one giving Livia the death glare. "Find some pinecones. A lot of them." He jabbed his hand toward the trees behind the gazebo. "Over there."
Annie could only stand so much. "Later," she said. "We need to get back to the cottage and see if mom's awake."
Livia's face turned into a thundercloud. "I don't want to go!"
"Don't give Annie a hard time," he said. "I'll finish the fairy house. You can see it later."
The fire had disrupted Livia's world. She hadn't had enough sleep, and she was as cranky as only an overstimulated four-your-old could be. "I'm not going!" she cried. "And if you don't let me stay, I'll tell your free secrets!"
Annie grabbed her arm. "You can't tell a free secret!"
"You absolutely can't!" Theo exclaimed.
"I can!" Livia retorted. "If they're both the same! ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Manners hadn't been whistling Dixie about the disturbances in the cottage, however. He seemed like a stand-up guy, even good enough to warn me about the house before I'd forked over the cash. He was probably right about Johnny, and probably Deanna too, at least up to the point where she'd jumped. Boy was he in for a shock! ~ Bobby Underwood

I'll plant and water, sow and weed, Till not an inch of earth shows brown, And take a vow of each small seed To grow to greenness and renown: And then some day you'll pass my way, See gold and crimson, bell and star, And catch my garden's soul, and say: "How sweet these cottage gardens are!" ~ E. Nesbit

It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flowerbeds on roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who needed it. It was a country so comfortable and enlightened that hospitals maintained cricket pitches for their staff and mental patients lived in Victorian palaces. If we could afford it then, why not now? Someone needs to explain to me how it is that the richer Britain gets the poorer it thinks itself. ~ Bill Bryson

As distasteful as it is to decline your invitation, I'm afraid that it is preferable to attending yet another half-assed weekend eating gunky canapes in that cesspool of a shack you call a beach cottage. ~ A.C. Kemp

Oh, no. That's just a name. Oswald isn't a man, he's an ondageist. Have you heard of poltergeists?" "Er ... invisible spirits that throw things around?" "Good," said Miss Level. "Well, an ondageist is the opposite. They're obsessive about tidiness. He's quite handy around the house, but he's absolutely dreadful if he's in the kitchen when I'm cooking. He keeps putting things away. I think it makes him happy. Sorry, I should have warned you, but he normally hides if anyone comes to the cottage. He's shy." "And ~ Terry Pratchett

I am enormously uncool. I've made a cottage industry of being uncool. And I'm fine with that. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Children being children, however, the grotesque Hopping Pot had taken hold of their imaginations. The solution was to jettison the pro-Muggle moral but keep the warty cauldron, so by the middle of the sixteenth century a different version of the tale was in wide circulation among wizarding families. In the revised story, the Hopping Pot protects an innocent wizard from his torch-bearing, pitchfork-toting neighbours by chasing them away from the wizard's cottage, catching them and swallowing them whole. ~ J.K. Rowling

You came down from your throne and stood at my cottage door.
I was singing all alone in a corner, and the melody caught your ear. You came down and stood at my cottage door.
Masters are many in your hall, and songs are sung there at all hours. But the simple carol of this novice struck at your love. One plaintive little strain mingled with the great music of the world, and with a flower for a prize you came down and stopped at my cottage door. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

There, all gone, Luce." And the little girl continued to open and squint shut her eyes. "All gone," she said eventually. Then, "More 'tato!" and the hunt began again. Inside, Isabel swept the floor in every room, gathering the sandy dust into piles in the corner, ready to gather up. Returning from a quick inspection of the bread in the oven, she found a trail leading all through the cottage, thanks to Lucy's attempts with the dustpan. ~ M.L. Stedman

The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake, the winds may blow through it, the storm may enter, the rain may enter; but the king of England cannot enter. ~ William Pitt, 1st Earl Of Chatham

You can't possibly fathom the ins and outs of a prepubescent beauty treatment until you've felt the strange but exhilarating tingle of a cottage-cheese-and-Pop-Rocks facial. ~ Sloane Crosley

I agree," Skyler replied. "There's nothing funny about it." He pointed to
the cottage. "The house is unoccupied; we have permanent residents
looking for a place to stay." He held up both hands. "What's the problem?"

"The problem?" Ella asked, with a raised eyebrow. "I think the problem
is six-foot tall, has black hair, green eyes and the ability to kick your ass
across Salvador. ~ S.F. Mazhar

I don't like you very much," she says in a small voice.
"You'll like me better when I've tied you to the bed in your parents' cottage."
She makes a noise that's half rage, half lust. Oh, I've got her number. I really do.
"I brought four neckties in preparation, Hermès, of course. Very silky. ~ Sarina Bowen

It was one of those delightfully irregular houses where you go up and down steps out of one room into another, and where you come upon more rooms when you think you have seen all there are, and where there is a bountiful provision of little halls and passages, and where you find still older cottage-rooms in unexpected places, with lattice windows and green growth pressing through them. ~ Charles Dickens

Wherever Harry went inside the tiny cottage or its garden, he could hear the constant ebb and flow of the sea, like the breathing of some great, slumbering creature. ~ J.K. Rowling

He went to look closely at the painting, which portrayed a parade of fat white geese strolling past the doorway of a cottage.
"Someday I'll be able to afford real art," Garrett said, coming to stand beside him. "In the meantime, we'll have to make do with this."
Ethan's attention was drawn to the tiny initials in the corner of the work: G.G. A slow smile broke over his face. "You painted it?"
"Art class, at boarding school," she admitted. "I wasn't bad at sketching, but the only subject I could manage to paint adequately was geese. At one point I tried to expand my repertoire to ducks, but those earned lower marks, so it was back to geese after that."
Ethan smiled, imagining her as a studious schoolgirl with long braids. The light of a glass-globe parlor lamp slid across the tidy pinned-up weight of her hair, bringing out gleams of red and gold. He'd never seen anything like her skin, fine and powerless, with a faint glow like a blush-colored garden rose.
"What gave you the idea to paint geese in the first place?" he asked.
"There was a goose pond across from the school," Garrett said, staring absently at the picture. "Sometimes I saw Miss Primrose at the front windows, watching with binoculars. One day I dared to ask her what she found so interesting about geese, and she told me they had a capacity for attachment and grief that rivaled humans. They mated for life, she said. If a goose was injured, the gander would stay with her even if the rest ~ Lisa Kleypas

See, you do care about him! Sarah, what Nolan Walker needs is a good wife to encourage him, to see that he eats properly, make sure he gets his rest." The picture Prissy had painted of Sarah as devoted wife, caring for Nolan, was a very appealing one. But she couldn't dwell on it, because Prissy wasn't done. "When are you going to get off your lofty perch and let yourself love him?" she went on. "That excuse that he's a Yankee's wearing a little thin by now, don't you think?" Sarah stared at her as they had reached their little cottage and went in. She hung up her coat with a sigh, then took Prissy's coat and hung it up, too. "Dr. Walker and I have become friends. But how can he and I be anything more if he's not a believer? The Bible warns about being unequally yoked, you know." Prissy groaned exasperatedly. "Sarah Matthews, if you gave that man the slightest bit of encouragement, he'd be sitting in the front pew every Sunday morning, and you know it. ~ Laurie Kingery

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe? ~ Allen Ginsberg

It was not a bed with curtains, but a bed with doors like shutters. This may not seem like a nice way of having a bed, but we would all be glad of the wooden curtains about us at night if we lived in such a cottage, on the side of a hill along which the wind swept like a wild river. Through the cottage it would be streaming all night long. And a poor woman with a cough, or a man who has been out in the cold all day, is very glad of such a place to lie in, and leave the the rest of the house to the wind and the fairies. ~ George MacDonald

I know these are only dreams. I know these days are long past. I wake to a dream in which Hammer's breath has stopped, and mine with it, and hearts have gone to a quiet sunny meadow with the sweetest little cottage in the middle, with a millwheel and a stream. Our bodies will lie tangled until they become earth, like roses twining so closely there is no beginning and no end, and only the shades of beauty that were their growing.
Every dream I ever had as a child has come true, simply because Hammer loved me. Perhaps this one will too. ~ Amy Lane

There is room in the smallest cottage for a happy loving pair. ~ Friedrich Schiller

I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Pale death approaches with equal step, and knocks indiscriminately at the door of teh cottage, and the portals of the palace. ~ Horace

Approaching Em's cottage, especially at night, always enchanted him. It was like walking into those fairy tales he'd read by flashlight under his bedcovers, full of rose-covered cottages and small stone bridges, glowing hearths and content couples hand in hand. His relieved father had thought he was reading Playboy but instead he was doing something infinitely more pleasurable and dangerous. He was dreaming of the day he'd create this fairy-tale world for himself, and he'd succeeded, at least in part. He had himself become a fairy. And as he looked at Em's cottage, its buttery light beaconing, he knew he'd walked right into the book he'd used to comfort himself when the world seemed cold and hard and unfair. Now he smiled and walked toward the house, carrying his Christmas Eve offering. ~ Louise Penny

Every summer my husband and I pack our suitcases, load our kids into the car, and drive from tense, crowded New York City to my family's cottage in Maine. It's on an island, with stretches of sea and sandy beaches, rocky coasts, and pine trees. We barbecue, swim, lie around, and try to do nothing. ~ Hope Davis

What were you doing spying on me?" she asked bluntly as she flounced down on a bench to inspect her charred skirts.
The lean, hard muscles of his thighs flexed beneath the tight-fitting breeches as he half sat, half leaned on a high stool nearby.
"I grew bored with viewing the ladies who meander about the markets, and I came to see if the sights were better here at the mayor's cottage."
The corners of his lips twitched with amusement, and his eyes gleamed into hers as he added, "I am happy to report, they are!"
Erienne got to her feet in a huff. "Have you nothing better to do than go about ogling the women?"
"I suppose I could find something else to occupy me," he replied easily, "but I can't think of anything that's nearly as enjoyable, except, of course, being in a lady's company."

-Erienne & Christopher ~ Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

Within a few hours the cottage furniture began to be wrapped up for preservation in the family absence - or, as Mr Meagles expressed it, the house began to put its hair in papers - and ~ Charles Dickens

Every antique farm-house and moss-grown cottage is a picture. ~ Washington Irving

It's a funny thing because Britain was in a terrible state in those days. It limped from crisis to crisis. It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flower beds in roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who needed it. It was a country so comfortable and enlightened that hospitals maintained cricket pitches for their staff and mental patients lived in Victorian palaces. ~ Bill Bryson

He feels
ennui
depression
adrift in his life. Purposeless, perhaps because
- dig a well in the Sudan and thejanjaweed come in and shoot the people anyway
- buy mosquito nets and the boys
you save grow up to
- rape women
- set up cottage industries in Myanmar and the army
- steals them and uses the women as slaves and
Ben is starting to be afraid that he is starting to share Chon's opinion of the human species
that people are basically
shit. ~ Don Winslow

One thing is very clear: the safest place and the best protection against the moral and spiritual diseases is a stable home and family. This has always been true; it will be true forever. We must keep that foremost in our minds. The scriptures speak of 'the shield of faith wherewith,' the Lord said, 'ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked' (D&C 27:17). This shield of faith is best fabricated in a cottage industry. While the shield can be polished in classes in the Church and in activities, it is meant to be handcrafted in the home and fitted to each individual. ~ Boyd K. Packer

In my late thirties the dream of disappointment and exhaustion had been the dream of the exploding head: the dream of a noise in my head so loud and long that I felt with the brain that survived that the brain could not survive; that this was death. Now, in my early fifties, after my illness, after I had left the manor cottage and put an end to that section of my life, I began to be awakened by thoughts of death, the end of things; and sometimes not even by thoughts so specific, not even by fear rational or fantastic, but by a great melancholy. This melancholy penetrated my mind while I slept; and then, when I awakened in response to its prompting, I was so poisoned by it, made so much not a doer (as men must be, every day of their lives), that it took the best part of the day to shake it off. And that wasted or dark day added to the gloom preparing for the night. ~ V.S. Naipaul

How good to see you, Miss Jones."
That debonair tone, the friendly press of his hand upon mine. It was such a contrast to our final moments in the cottage that I couldn't help but smirk.
"Thank you for having me," I replied, loudly enough for the duke to hear.
"But I haven't," said Armand under his breath. "So far."
I tugged back my hand. "Ever the gentleman, aren't you?"
"I try. Come aboard, waif. Come and experience a gentleman's world. ~ Shana Abe

I gently pressed on the back of my head, wondering how bad the gash was. Beneath the crusted patch of blood, there was still a sizable lump. It was ironic that a housekeeper armed only with an iron pot had nearly done in the Assassin of Venda.
How the Rahtan would laugh at that.
The name dug into me with a surprising sting - and longing. Rahtan. It brought back the familiar, the feeling of pride, the one place in my entire life where I had felt like I belonged. Now I was in a kingdom that didn't want me and in a cottage where I wasn't welcome. I didn't want to be here either, but I couldn't leave. I wondered about Griz and Eben. Surely Griz was healed and they were on their way by now. They were the closest thing I had to family - a family of poisonous vipers. The thought made me grin. ~ Mary E. Pearson

In cathedral or cottage, the art of worship is an inner adventure; it is the personal practice of the presence of God. ~ Wilferd Peterson

entire cottage industry centered just on Aritomo-sensei, ~ Tan Twan Eng

Where were you?" she asked before he turned the knob. He paused, and she clarified: "I came to the cottage last week to find you, to tell you about Reading, but you weren't there. Where were you?"
He glanced back at her. "You'll have to be more specific."
"Tuesday," she said. "I searched for a hint . . . waited, but you never came. I left the note on your windowsill."
A small smile touched his lips - almost a sheepish smile, of all things. Ceony had never before seen such an expression on his face. "Just out for a stroll. ~ Charlie N. Holmberg

American forces in Iraq found $650 million in American cash sealed in a hidden cottage. See, this is why President Bush wants to invade Iraq, the whole place is oil and cash. It's like Republican Disneyland. ~ Jay Leno

A palace cannot make you rich but a cottage in the woods can! We become rich only through simpleness and modestness! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

brain as a shadow passes away upon a white screen. She lives in the cottage and works for Miss Swaffer. She is Amy Foster for everybody, and the child is 'Amy Foster's boy.' She calls him Johnny - which means Little John. "It is impossible to say whether this name recalls anything to her. Does she ever think of the past? I have seen her hanging over the boy's cot in a ~ Joseph Conrad

With a resounding bang, the door burst open. A crazed man gaped at her with piercing and anguished blue eyes. Grunting, he staggered inside and collapsed face first to the floor.

Max launched into a cacophony of barking, racing around the man as if the spaniel had made a conquest.

A cold wind chilled the cottage while Jane tried to steady the poker with both hands and point it at the burly form. He didn't move.

Max whimpered and licked the man's face. Then the dog curled up beside him.

Jane gaped. "Merciful father. ~ Amy Jarecki

But I awoke at three, feeling terribly sad, and feeling rebelliously that I didn't want to study sadness, madness, melancholy, and despair. I wanted to study triumphs, the rediscoveries of love, all that I know in the world to be decent, radiant, and clear. Then the word "love", the impulse to love, welled up in me somewhere above my middle. Love seemed to flow from me in all directions, abundant as water--love for Cora, love for Flora, love for all my friends and neighbors, love for Penumbra. This tremendous flow of vitality could not be contained within its spelling, and I seemed to seize a laundry marker and write "luve" on the wall. I wrote "luve" on the staircase, "luve" on the pantry, "luve" on the oven, the washing machine, and the coffeepot, and when Cora came down in the morning (I would be nowhere around) everywhere she looked she would read "luve", "luve", "luve." Then I saw a green meadow and a sparkling stream. On the ridge there were thatched-roof cottages and a square church tower, so I knew it must be England. I climbed up from the meadow to the streets of the village, looking for the cottage where Cora and Flora would be waiting for me. There seemed to have been some mistake. No one knew their names. I asked at the post office, but the answer here was the same. Then it occurred to me that they would be at the manor house. How stupid I had been! I left the village and walked up a sloping lawn to a Georgian house, where a butler let me in. The squire was entert ~ John Cheever

The palace is not safe when the cottage is not happy. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

Keep quiet about a toothpick in today's butter and next thing you know you'll be findin' a doorknob in the cottage cheese. ~ Alan Bradley

A cottage will hold as much happiness as would stock a palace. ~ Hamilton Wright Mabie

It's very bad form to spy on one's host," he said, planting his hands on his hips and somehow managing to look both authoritative and relaxed at the same time.
"It was an accident," she grumbled.
"Oh, I believe you there," he said. "But even if you didn't intend to spy on me, the fact remains that when the opportunity arose, you took it."
"Do you blame me?"
He grinned. "Not at all. I would have done precisely the same thing."
Her mouth fell open.
"Oh, don't pretend to be offended," he said.
"I'm not pretending."
He leaned a bit closer. "To tell the truth, I'm quite flattered."
"It was academic curiosity," she ground out. "I assure you."
His smile grew sly. "So you're telling me that you would have spied upon any naked man you'd come across?"
"Of course not!"
"As I said," he drawled, leaning back against a tree, "I'm flattered."
"Well, now that we have that settled," Sophie said with a sniff, "I'm going back to Your Cottage. ~ Julia Quinn

Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes. Now and again an Emily Bronte or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.

[…]any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. ~ Virginia Woolf

In fact, in some ways, I actually feel much more confident about the quality of Carousel than I do about The Cottage Builder's Letter: probably because of its cohesive nature. ~ George Murray

A little girl was threatened by a wolf while walking through the forest, and as she fled from him she met a woodsman with an ax, but in this story the woodsman did not merely kill the wolf and restore the girl to her family, oh no. He cut off the wolf's head, then brought the girl to his cottage in the thickest, darkest part of the forest, and there he kept her until she was old enough to wed him, and she became his bride in a ceremony conducted by an owl, even though she had never stopped crying for her parents in all the years that he had kept her prisoner. And she had children by him, and the woodsman raised them to hunt wolves and to seek out people who strayed from the paths of the forest. They were told to kill the men and take what was valuable from their pockets, but to bring the women to him. ~ John Connolly

In the ensuing two weeks Ian managed to buy back Elizabeth's emeralds and Havenhurst, but he was unable to find a trace of his wife. The town house in London felt like a prison, not a home, and still he waited, sensing somehow that Elizabeth was putting him through this torment to teach him some kind of well-deserved lesson.
He returned to Montmayne, where, for several more weeks, he prowled about its rooms, paced a track in the drawing room carpet, and stared into its marble-fronted fireplaces as if the answer would be there in the flames. Finally he could stand it no more. He couldn't concentrate on his work, and when he tried, he made mistakes. Worse, he was beginning to be haunted with walking nightmares that she'd come to harm-or that she was falling in love with someone kinder than he-and the tormenting illusions followed him from room to room.
On a clear, cold day in early December, after leaving instructions with his footmen, butler, and even his cook that he was to be notified immediately if any word at all was received from Elizabeth, he left for the cottage in Scotland. It was the one place where he might find peace from the throbbing emptiness that was gnawing away at him with a pain that increased unbearably from day to day, because he no longer really believed she would ever contact him. ~ Judith McNaught

Amelia and Poppy both glanced at their younger sister quizzically. "Do you know what we're talking about, Bea?" Amelia asked.
"Yes, of course. Merripen's in love with her. I knew it a long time ago, from the way he washed her window."
"Washed her window?" both older sisters asked at the same time.
"Yes, when we lived in the cottage at Primrose Place. Win's room had a casement window that looked out onto the big maple tree - do you remember? After the scarlet fever, when Win couldn't get out of bed for the longest time and she was too weak to hold a book, she would just lie there and watch a birds' nest on one of the tree limbs. She saw the baby swallows hatch and learn to fly. One day she complained that the window was so dirty, she could barely see through it, and it made the sky look grayish. So from then on Merripen always kept the glass spotless. Sometimes he climbed a ladder to wash the outside, and you know how afraid of heights he is. You never saw him do that?"
"No," Amelia said with difficulty, her eyes stinging. "I didn't know he did that."
"Merripen said the sky should always be blue for her," Beatrix said. "And that was when I knew he … are you crying, Poppy?"
Poppy used a napkin to dab at the corners of her eyes. "No. I just inh-haled some pepper."
"So did I," Amelia said, blowing her nose. ~ Lisa Kleypas

I once lived in a cottage made entirely of wood, and there was an electrical fire. We all ran outside, and no one got hurt, but the house was demolished. ~ Taylor Kinney

What I don't get is how this helps me. You two get superpowers, and I get what?"Cian smiled broadly. "You have a power, Meggie. You have a magical pussy. It was sleeping with you together that brought us into our power. That vagina of yours is pure gold, lover." Meg gave Cian a playful shove and rolled her eyes while he and his brother had a good laugh."Don't go expecting to use it on anyone else," Beck said as though the thought had suddenly occurred to him. "That only works on the two of us."Meg walked up to him and gave him a saucy smile. "Yes, Beck, I was planning on opening up shop. I was going to hang a sign on the cottage door and charge for it. ~ Sophie Oak

I first saw the island of Noirmoutier when I was two weeks old. I think it's probably safe to say that I didn't fully appreciate it at the time; but I grew to love it as year after year I spent holidays there at my grandparents' cottage. ~ Joanne Harris

I give you my word that, until I started to tramp the place with this child, I never had a notion that it was such a difficult job restoring a son to his parents. How kidnappers ever get caught is a mystery to me. I searched Marvis Bay like a bloodhound, but nobody came forward to claim the infant. You would have thought, from the lack of interest in him, that he was stopping there all by himself in a cottage of his own. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

I started looking at small companies that were running a sort of virtual reality cottage industry: I had imagined that I would just put on a helmet and be somewhere else - that's your dream of what it's going to be. ~ Thomas Dolby

I'm very happy in my 18th century worker's cottage in Kent and playing my music for the dog-walkers paused outside. ~ Christian McKay

I signaled the bus-driver and he stopped the bus for me right outside the cottage, and I flew down the steps of the bus straight into the arms of the waiting mother. ~ Roald Dahl

Suddenly there was a humming in the air, and the bees were there too. They flowed out of Granny Weatherwax's hive, circling Tiffany like a halo, crowning her, and swarm and girl stood on the threshold of the cottage and Tiffany reached out her arms and the bees settled along them, and welcomed her home. ~ Terry Pratchett