I lived here once," the author said after a moment.
"Here? For a long time?"
"No. For just a little while when I was young."
"It must have been rather cramped."
"I didn't notice."
"Would you like to try it again?"
"No. And I couldn't if I wanted to."
He shivered slightly and closed the windows. As they went downstairs, the visitor said, half apologetically: "It's really just like all houses, isn't it?"
The author nodded.
"I didn't think it was when I built it, but in the end I suppose it's just like other houses after all.

What about the residential areas? What about my home? What about other families who houses that are still underwater? What are you doing to meet immediately meet our needs,

If someone had been holding the line on keeping houses intact, Pleasant Hill would be viewed as a gem. You'd have a whole different set of people living here.

Jersey is my hometown, and I love it. I'll probably have houses in other places, but that's my home, and nobody's kicking me out of there.

Whatever happens in the world - whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over - eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house. Wars, famine, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment - they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers, tucked into the folds of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the paint on your walls and the water in your pipes. So the history of household life isn't just a history of beds and sofas and kitchen stoves ... but of scurvy and guano and the Eiffel Tower and bedbugs and body-snatching and just about everything else that has ever happened. Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up.

We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.