Extracts
On Home
Selected from the Winter 2017 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
Every house: temple, empire, school.
—Joseph Joubert, 1800
God walks among the pots and pans.
—Saint Teresa of Ávila, c. 1582
For the truth is that to the moderately poor the home is the only place of liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy. It is the only spot on the earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1910
The first tenement New York knew bore the mark of Cain from its birth.
—Jacob Riis, 1890
The home is a human institution. All human institutions are open to improvement.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1903
True happiness, we consider, is incompatible with an inefficient drainage system.
—Freya Stark, 1931
One who is frivolous all day will never establish a household.
—Ptahhotep, c. 2400 BC
To build one’s own house is very much like making one’s will. When the time does arrive for building this house, it is not the mason’s nor the craftsman’s moment, but that moment in which every man makes one poem, at any rate, in his life.
—Le Corbusier, 1923
Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
—William Morris, 1882
Charity begins at home, and justice begins next door.
—Charles Dickens, 1843
It’s your business when your neighbor’s wall is in flames.
—Horace, 19 BC
The men who fight and die for Italy enjoy the common air and light, indeed, but nothing else. Houseless and homeless, they wander about with their wives and children. And it is with lying lips that their imperators exhort the soldiers in their battles to defend sepulchres and shrines from the enemy.
—Plutarch, 133 BC
An American will build a house in which to pass his old age and sell it before the roof is on.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840
Home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903
Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization.
—Rebecca West, 1912
I quit life as from an inn, not as from a home.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 44 BC
At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
—Rose Macaulay, 1925
Men are merriest when they are from home.
—William Shakespeare, 1599
For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?
—Jane Austen, 1813
An exile with no home anywhere is a corpse without a grave.
—Publilius Syrus, c. 50 BC
Every man has a lurking wish to appear considerable in his native place.
—Samuel Johnson, 1771
Many a man who thinks to found a home discovers that he has merely opened a tavern for his friends.
—Norman Douglas, 1917
Hospitality consists in a little fire, a little food, and an immense quiet.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1856
A crust of bread and a corner to sleep in A minute to smile and an hour to weep in. —Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1895
Everything seemed to smile a welcome home. Mount Baker’s frosted dome, the mighty fir forests, the shining river, and last but not least, my flourishing kitchen garden. How the cabbages, beets, turnips, and all the rest of the toothsome array seemed to put on broad smiles of greeting. Truly, I thought, this is a goodly land.
—Phoebe Judson, 1853
And so I was completely fenced in and fortified, as I thought, from all the world, and consequently slept secure in the night.
—Daniel Defoe, 1659
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Winter 2017