Estate agents. You can't live with them, you can't live with them. The first sign of these nasty purulent sores read more

Estate agents. You can't live with them, you can't live with them. The first sign of these nasty purulent sores appeared round about 1894. With their jangling keys, nasty suits, revolting beards, moustaches and tinted spectacles, estate agents roam the land causing perturbation and despair. If you try and kill them, you're put in prison: if you try and talk to them, you vomit. There's only one thing worse than an estate agent but at least that can be safely lanced, drained and surgically dressed. Estate agents. Love them or loathe them, you'd be mad not to loathe them.

Construed as turf, home just seems a provisional claim, a designation you make upon a place, not one it makes read more

Construed as turf, home just seems a provisional claim, a designation you make upon a place, not one it makes on you. A certain set of buildings, a glimpsed, smudged window-view across a schoolyard, a musty aroma sniffed behind a garage when you were a child, all of which come crowding in upon your latter-day senses -- those are pungent things and vivid, even consoling. But to me they are also inert and nostalgic and unlikely to connect you to the real, to that essence art can sometimes achieve, which is permanence.

There is no place more delightful than one's own fireside.
[Lat., Nullus est locus domestica sede jucundior.]

There is no place more delightful than one's own fireside.
[Lat., Nullus est locus domestica sede jucundior.]

To make a happy fireside clime
To weans and wife,
That's the true pathos and sublime
read more

To make a happy fireside clime
To weans and wife,
That's the true pathos and sublime
Of human life.

When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that read more

When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.

The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.

The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever come to sit by it. Passersby read more

One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever come to sit by it. Passersby see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on the way.

"Home" is any four walls that enclose the right person.

"Home" is any four walls that enclose the right person.