Domesticity Quotes

“I think it's kinda nice.' And I did. my mom isn't famous for her pies. No, she's famous for defusing a nuclear device in Brussels with only a pair of cuticle scissors and a ponytail holder. Somehow, at the moment, pies seemed cooler.”
― Ally Carter, I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

“Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea.”
― Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret

“She wandered over to the enclosed range, a rather modern-looking contraption that Cook had purchased earlier in the year. “Do you know how to work this?” she asked.

“No idea. You?”

Daphne shook her head. “None.” She reached forward and gingerly touched the surface of the stove top. “It's not hot.”

“Not even a little bit?”

She shook her head. “It's rather cold, actually.”

Brother and sister were silent for a few seconds.

“You know,” Anthony finally said, “cold milk might be quite refreshing.”

“I was just thinking that very thing!”
― Julia Quinn, The Duke and I

“I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices

“There is, in the Army, a little known but very important activity appropriately called Fatigue. Fatigue, in the Army, is the very necessary cleaning and repairing of the aftermath of living. Any man who has ever owned a gun has known Fatigue, when, after fifteen minutes in the woods and perhaps three shots at an elusive squirrel, he has gone home to spend three-quarters of an hour cleaning up his piece so that it will be ready next time he goes to the woods. Any woman who has ever cooked a luscious meal and ladled it out in plates upon the table has known Fatigue, when, after the glorious meal is eaten, she repairs to the kitchen to wash the congealed gravy from the plates and the slick grease from the cooking pots so they will be ready to be used this evening, dirtied, and so washed again. It is the knowledge of the unendingness and of the repetitious uselessness, the do it up so it can be done again, that makes Fatigue fatigue.”
― James Jones, From Here to Eternity

“I'm sick and tired of having a forest and a torture chamber in my house... I want to have a nice quiet flat with ordinary doors and windows and a wife inside it, like anybody else!”
― Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera

“Men demand much more than you think," she would tell her enigmatically. "There's a lot of cooking, a lot of sweeping, a lot of suffering over little things beyond what you think.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Haunted house fictions play upon the complex fears and concerns about domestic issues that women have long grappled with.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“What made their marriage more than a run-of-the-mill case of domestic estrangement was her refusal to accept her lot. She stayed furious all the days of her life - so sure of her ground, so successfully spoiled, that she was impervious to the social pressures and propaganda that made most women settle down to play the part of wife.”
― Lorna Sage

“I keep a list as close as my phone, and draw a deep sense of satisfaction each time I strike a task from it. In such erasure lies joy. No matter how much I give of myself to household chores, each of the rooms under my control swiftly unravels itself again in my aftermath, as though a shadow hand were already beginning the unwritten lists of my tomorrows…”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing.”
― Sarah Manguso, Liars

“In spite of lip service paid to domestic duties, in 1881 the Census excluded women’s household chores from the category of productive work and, for the first time, housewives were classified as unoccupied.”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business

“It's not the nineteenth century; I'm not meant to be judged on how good a housekeeper I am. Getting down on the floor with a lemon and a bucket of vinegar does not make me a better person.”
― Emily Matchar

“A house is a kind of box you put a girl in.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“...the giving of tea parties is by no means my favorite amusement. In fact, I would prefer to be pursued across the desert by a band of savage Dervishes brandishing spears and howling for my blood. I would rather be chased up a tree by a mad dog, or face a mummy risen from its grave. I would rather be threatened by knives, pistols, poisonous snakes, and the curse of a long-dead king....”
― Elizabeth Peters

“A calm virility and a dreamy humour, marked contrasts to her level-headedness--into these moods she slipped sometimes as a refuge. She could do the most prosy things (though she was wise enough never to stultify herself with such 'household arts' as knitting or embroidery), yet immediately afterward pick up a book and let her imagination rove as a formless cloud with the wind.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“In a sexist, male-dominated society, women have been selected over many generations for submissiveness, looks, juvenility etc. They certainly weren’t selected for intelligence and aggression. Is the type of women we have today a reflection of a dog-like breeding process? Have we actually bred overly emotional, underly rational women; women who are obsessed with appearance, compliance and emotional intelligence? Just as dogs were bred to be attuned to the moods of their owners, is the same true of women? Were women selected according to how well they fitted in with the tastes of their dominant,
aggressive male masters? They’re so emotionally smart because men bred them for exactly that
purpose. Women are not renowned for aggression, dominance, assertiveness and intelligence because dominant men didn’t want any of those traits in their women. All SUPERWOMEN (the type of women who could give men a run for their money) were DESELECTED by a dominant male culture that didn’t value talented women and just wanted subservient, pretty adornments.”
― Adam Weishaupt, Wolf or Dog?

“Xiao YuAn: “I know that you want me to sleep in your tent, but my clothes are in my tent. You must let me get my clothes, right?”

Yan HeQing looked at him: “You can wear mine.”

Xiao YuAn: “….. your clothes don’t fit me.”

Yan HeQing: “Yes, I know. Wear my clothes.”

Xiao YuAn: “….. Alright, fine.”
― 伊依以翼, 穿成囚禁男主的反派要如何活命 How to Survive As a Villain

“We are earthbound creatures, Maggie had thought. No matter how tempting the sky. No matter how beautiful the stars. No matter how deep the dream of flight. We are creatures of the earth. Born with legs, not wings, legs that root us to the earth, and hands that allow us to build our homes, hands that bind us to our loved ones within those homes. The glamour, the adrenaline rush, the true adventure, is here, within these homes. The wars, the detente, the coups, the peace treaties, the celebrations, the mournings, the hunger, the sating, all here.”
― Thrity Umrigar

“Gardening and making your own soap and home-birthing your babies are fine, but these are inherently limited actions. If we want to see genuine food safety, if we want to see sustainable products, if we want to see a better women's health system, and if we want these things for everyone, not just the privileged few with the time and education to DIY it, then we need large social changes.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“As Liljana sat stitching a sampler or darning a sock, she dreamed her way into life as a grown woman with her own household to run, her own home to tidy, her own children to mind, and her own husband to cheer after a long day's work as they sat together by the fire. The life that future generations would dismiss as dull and degrading offered Liljana the liberating prospect of being mistress in her own home rather than living to serve others.”
― Fiorella De Maria, We'll Never Tell Them: A Novel

“Bucolic peace is not my ambience, and the giving of tea parties is by no means my favorite amusement. In fact, I would prefer to be pursued across the desert by a band of savage Dervishes brandishing spears and howling for my blood. I would rather be chased up a tree by a mad dog, or face a mummy risen from its grave. I would rather be threatened by knives, pistols, poisonous snakes, and the curse of a long-dead king. Lest I be accused of exaggeration,.... Emerson once remarked that if I should encounter a band of Dervishes, five minutes of my nagging would unquestionably inspire even the mildest of them to massacre me....”
― Elizabeth Peters

“I would have you come into the heart of the outer world and meet reality. Merely going on with your household duties, living your life in the world of household conventions and the drudgery of household tasks - you were not made for that! If we meet, and recognize each other, in the real world, then only will our love be true.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World

“she was wishing that whatever stage of her life she was in now could be got through quickly, for it was seeing to her interminable. If life had to be looked at in terms of high moments. or peaks, then nothing had "happened" to her for a long time; snd she could look forward to nothing much but a dwindling away from full household activity into getting old”
― Doris Lessing

“She pitied these women trapped in this semblance of happiness. She pitied their daughters being raised in this modernized cult of domesticity.”
― Wiss Auguste, The Illusions of Hope

“Through the reformatory movement then, the criminal justice system became a mechanism used to punish women who did not perform social reproductive labour according to the white, bourgeois ideal. This ideal was reinforced in the reformatories where women were taught to perform domestic tasks such as laundry and needlework. This training in domestic labour served a dual function. On the one hand, it trained working-class women in the ‘cult of domesticity’. On the other, it served to produce a labour force of domestic servants since women were often released from reformatories into bourgeois homes where they worked for below-average wages. In other words, both reflecting and reproducing the relations of the gendered capitalist labour market more broadly, while imprisoned men were performing industrial labour, women in the reformatories were being trained in domestic labour which they were expected to perform either for no wages in a patriarchal household or for low wages in the labour market.”
― Adrienne Roberts, Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare: Feminist Political Economy, Primitive Accumulation and the Law

“The effect of the mortification of the domestic affections upon the general character was probably very pernicious. The family circle is the appointed sphere, not only for the performance of manifest duties, but also for the cultivation of the affections; and the extreme ferocity which so often characterised the ascetic was the natural consequence of the discipline he imposed upon himself. Severed from all other ties, the monks clung with desperate tenacity to their opinions and to their Church, and hated those who dissented from them with all the intensity of men whose whole lives were concentrated on a single subject, whose ignorance and bigotry prevented them from conceiving the possibility of any good thing in opposition to themselves, and who had made it a main object of their discipline to eradicate all natural sympathies and affections.”
― William Edward Hartpole Lecky, History of European morals from Augustus to Charlemagne

“Min has brought me a present of my own. It is a shiny pink apron. On the apron there are words, curling white and maggoty letters: 'Little lady'. Min holds the apron in front of my face until I am forced to look at it. She slips the string over my head and ties the back securely with a double knot.”
― Alice Ash, Paradise Block

“Our move here seems to have robbed us of all those small, relaxed moments where nobody asks anything of anybody, except that they know they're loved.”
― Gilly Macmillan, The Nanny

“Free, heart tight, expectant, in love, she was not sure what her position would be in the household, not sure about much except that she did not want to be anywhere else.”
― Leila Aboulela, River Spirit