A house is never a home until we have crusted it with the spoils of a hundred lives besides those of our own past.
 Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858). copy citation

Context

“But our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer natures. See a householder breaking up and you will be sure of it. There is a shell-fish which builds all manner of smaller shells into the walls of its own. A house is never a home until we have crusted it with the spoils of a hundred lives besides those of our own past. See what these are and you can tell what the occupant is. I had no idea,—said the Professor,—until I pulled up my domestic establishment the other day, what an enormous quantity of roots I had been making during the years I was planted there.” source