Sister Parish Quotations

My birth certificate read Dorothy May Kinnicutt, but, lest you think that the name "Sister" has any ecclesiastical significance, let me hasten to point out that it was immediately hung on me by my three-year-old brother, Frankie.

Even the simplest wicker basket can become priceless when it is loved and cared for through the generations of a family.

Our American forebears included Cotton Mather and Oliver Wolcott, who signed the Declaration of Independence, and we were told that a strong wire of character stretched from them through all generations of our family.

It has not been an easy name, yet it has brought me many a laugh.

It has not been an easy cross to bear. It has caused considerable confusion. My husband constantly complained about the awkwardness of being married to a woman whom he called Sister.

Even my aunt Joan, hopelessly sentimental about every member of our family, admitted that I was hideous.

Home, the idea of home, is my principal purpose. If people have bought a house as an investment or chosen the furniture because they'll be able to sell it for more, you can tell in two minutes. You know, our parents didn't buy a house as an investment. They bought it as a place to bring you up, to give you roots.

You can never achieve anything in a house unless you have things that have been passed down and you find a place for them for yourself.

It is only my eye that has helped me. I am still hopeless with that thing called a scale ruler. I love color, but that comes very naturally to me. From the beginning, I never followed trends. If I was aware of them, I didn't care, for I believed as I do now, that rooms should be timeless and very personal. I don't set out to achieve a particular style. And I certainly don't have a 'look' - just a mishmash of everything that somehow, by instinct, usually turns out to be a warm imaginative, 'living room'.

I think everyone must have a first memory of some house, some room, a vivid picture that will remain deep down in one forever.

...When someone asks me to help create a room my first reaction, if I do not already know the person, is to try to feel out what he or she really wants the room to be and to understand, if possible, what "memory," old or new, has brought this idea about.

Behind every attractive room there should be a very good reason.

Innovation is often the ability to reach into the past and bring back what is good, what is beautiful, what is useful, what is lasting.

Rooms should be timeless.

The last occasions when the timetable of our lives would be interrupted for many years to come.