Domesticity Quotes

“Does housekeeping interest you at all? I think it really ought to be just as good as writing and I never see where the separation between the too comes in. At least if you must put books on one side and life on the other, each is a poor and bloodless thing; but my theory is that they mix indistinguishable.”

“The domestic man, who loves no music so well as his kitchen clock, and the airs which the logs sing to him as they burn on the hearth, has solaces which others never dream of.”

“I like to serve chocolate cake, because it doesn't show the dirt.”

“Every time I go near the stove, the dog howls.”

“Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing up is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.”

“I'm eighteen years behind in my ironing.”

“Have the man at the station put the air in the tires. I did it once myself. Have you ever seen a car with a limp?”

“I serve dinner in three phases: serve the food, clear the table, bury the dead.”

“Most married couples spend the whole day apart, the woman in the house, the man in the office or study or workshop.”

“It's a dangerous thing to be married right up to the hilt, like my daughter's husband. The man is at home all day, like a damned soul in hell.”

“She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty years. At the end of it she was still singing.”

“The Rose Bowl is the only bowl I've ever seen that I didn't have to clean.”

“Making coffee has become the great compromise of the decade. It's the only thing "real" men do that doesn't seem to threaten their masculinity. To women, it's on the same domestic entry level as putting the spring back into the toilet-tissue holder or taking a chicken out of the freezer to thaw.”

“There's something wrong with a mother who washes out a measuring cup with soap and water after she's only measured water in it.”