Estates Quotes

“Adam Antonovich's father was a tubby tyrant with a triple chin and chinks where his eyes should have been. All his life he had amassed money. In old age he had exchanged it for space; his estates grew, grew and swelled.

("Adam")”
― Andrey Bely, Silver Age of Russian Culture

“His two-month search for Charlotte had led him to Hampshire, a place of heather-carpeted hills, ancient hunting forests, and treacherous valley bogs. The western country was prosperous, its twenty market towns abundantly filled with wool, timber, dairy products, honey, and bacon. Among the Hampshire's renowned estates, Stony Cross Park was considered to be the finest. The manor house and private lake were situated in the fertile Itchen River valley.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Worth Any Price

“The estate Marjorie envisioned was to be erected in the middle of the seventeen-acre lot, which, when cleared of jungle growth, would be surrounded by great stretches of rolling lawn with views of Lake Worth and the Atlantic.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, American Empress: The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post

“I like to think of the houses I build as having their own personalities. Oh, there's the people who are their custodians to consider, of course, a symbiosis in the relationship between the house and its owner, but sometimes these grand estates have a way of forcing their residents to their will, of bending and shaping the trajectory of their lives. After all, when our bones turn to dust, these wall will still stand.”
― Chanel Cleeton, The House on Biscayne Bay

“Blinded, now, in more than one way, Gail made Kaida co-owner and the sole beneficiary of her home, secretly, away from her other daughters and their heirs.
Kaida told her children that she and Gail had created a “trust bequest” for them but advised them to keep the secret from the rest of the family.
When the Quit Claim Deed was filed in county records, it was returned to Kaida’s name, not to Gail.
Unfortunately for the rest of the family, this mother-daughter relationship had become so intertwined and interdependent, it was difficult to see which one was the host tree and which one was the strangler fig.
The tree, now grown tall, would bloom in the foreseeable future. Only a death certificate and affidavit needed to be filed in order for Kaida to claim her mother’s full estate.”
― Lynn Byk, The Fearless Moral Inventory of Elsie Finch

“The people I love will mourn me, but I won't be around to commiserate. I become gloomy thinking of insensate things I will leave behind. My survivors will cram into plastic bags the tchotchkes I have lived with, expanding a landfill. I needn’t worry about my Andy Warhols. I fret over the striped stone that my daughter picked up at the pond, or my father’s desk lamp from college, or a miniature wooden milk wagon from the family dairy. My mother approaching ninety feared that we would junk the Hummel figurines that decorated her mantelpiece, kitsch porcelain dolls popular from the forties to the sixties. Thus, a box of them rests in my daughter’s attic. More important to me is this house, which my great-grandfather moved to in 1865—the family place for almost a century and a half. In the back chamber the generations stored everything broken or useless, because no one knew when they might come in handy. My kids and grandkids don’t want to live in rural isolation—why should they?—but it’s melancholy to think of the house emptied out. Better it should burn down.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty