Domesticity Quotes

No gunfire, famine, or flies. Just lots of toothpaste, gardening and people stuff. ~ Mark Z. Danielewski

God goes home at night in the bodies of faithful women. ~ Summer Kinard

Wild Things in Captivity

Wild things in captivity
while they keep their own wild purity
won't breed, they mope, they die.

All men are in captivity,
active with captive activity,
and the best won't breed, though they don't know why.

The great cage of our domesticity
kills sex in a man, the simplicity
of desire is distorted and twisted awry.

And so, with bitter perversity,
gritting against the great adversity,
they young ones copulate, hate it, and want to cry.

Sex is a state of grace.
In a cage it can't take place.
Break the cage then, start in and try. ~ D.H. Lawrence

...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

Loft living is the antithesis of suburban domesticity, if only because the open spaces don't easily accommodate family life. Lofts also offer residents the opportunity - and responsibility - to structure their own space to reflect what's important to them. ~ Virginia Postrel

Domesticity is the enemy of art. I don't know if that's true. You can write good happy songs. So, I don't think it's necessarily happiness. But I think self-satisfaction is maybe the enemy. It's kind of better to think, "Tomorrow night I'm gonna sing it better." There is this forward effort. It feels to me right, it feels human. ~ Paul McCartney

Her love for him has always been the underdog. She roots for it as if from a distance. She imagines what they must look like through the uncurtained window, the picture of tranquil domesticity they must now make. He smells like cilantro and beer, like curry and rain. And underneath that, he smells like himself, like nobody else, his body alarming because it is already so familiar. ~ Emily Fridlund

I lead a life of blameless domesticity and always have done. ~ Boris Johnson

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

Housekeepers, homemakers, wives, and mothers are fundamental social relations, which rest upon woman's characteristics, physical, mental, and moral. ~ R. Heber Newton

But she wasn't a wife and mother. And, Joey aside, she didn't want to be one. Her mother had spend every last minute cooking for Papa, cleaning for Papa, looking nice for Papa, entertaining for Papa, producing babies for Papa. The measuring stick she used to judge herself based on how pleased or displeased Papa was with her, their home, and her ability to raise their children properly.
The very thought of being measured by that same stick horrified Billy. She couldn't think of anything worse. As far as she was concerned, domesticity was nothing more than a glorified jail sentence. ~ Deeanne Gist

Domesticity was meat and drink to Mouse, and she liked taking care of people. She had done it for so long that it had become a habit with her. ~ Helen Kieran Reilly

This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining. ~ Michael Cunningham

And we built up between ourselves a pathetic sort of domesticity that we both felt need of. We began tasting our food again, making little discoveries in grocery stores, bringing them home to share. When strawberries came in season, I remember, Kraft and I whooped it up as though Jesus had returned. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

What's domesticity? Breakfast in bed? The cuckold going to shoot his wife? Does one inevitably lead to the other? I'm asking because there are no rules anymore and I don't want to end up fucked up. I don't want to destroy anyone through my love. But I don't want to end up chasing intimacy from strangers either. ~ Christos Tsiolkas

Even his initial stirrings of domesticity had some quirks. He bought a proper house in the Los Gatos hills, which he adorned with a Maxfield Parrish painting, a Braun coffeemaker, and Henckels knives. But because he was so obsessive when it came to selecting furnishings, it remained mostly barren, lacking beds or chairs or couches. Instead his bedroom had a mattress in the center, framed pictures of Einstein and Maharaj-ji on the walls, and an Apple II on the floor. ~ Anonymous

I loved the domesticity of my life as a struggling actor. When I wasn't going to auditions, I could do things like cook dishes from scratch and take them to parties or be really thoughtful about birthdays and anniversaries. ~ Jenna Fischer

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

Home joys are blessed of heaven. ~ Seneca The Younger

Home should be the center of joy, equatorial and tropical. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

It turns out that Molly wasn't her mother's daughter in that respect. Charity was like the MacGuyver of the kitchen. She could whip up a five-course meal for twelve from an egg, two spaghetti noodles, some household chemicals, and a stick of chewing gum. Molly ...
Molly once burned my egg. My boiled egg. I don't know how. ~ Jim Butcher

But though the essential of the woman's task is universality, this does not, of course, prevent her from having one or two severe though largely wholesome prejudices. She has, on the whole, been more conscious than man that she is only one half of humanity; but she has expressed it (if one may say so of lady) by getting her teeth into the two or three things which she thinks she stands for. I would observe here in parenthesis that much of the recent official trouble about women has arisen from the fact that they transfer to things of doubt and reason that sacred stubbornness only proper to the primary things which a woman was set to guard.
One's own children, one's own altar, ought to be a matter of principle--
or if you like, a matter of prejudice. On the other hand, who wrote Junius's Letters ought not to be a principle or a prejudice, it ought to be a matter of free and almost indifferent inquiry. But take an energetic modern girl secretary to a league to show that George III wrote Junius, and in three months she will believe it, too, out of mere loyalty to her employers. Modern women defend their office with all the fierceness of domesticity. They fight for desk and typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfish wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm. That is why they do office work so well; and that is why they ought not to do it. ~ G.K. Chesterton

I feel domesticity just slipping off me. It is a choice. Either one can let it go or one can intensify it. The people who intensify it seem to get quite a lot of interest out of that, too, and are as preoccupied as pirates. ~ Sylvia Townsend Warner

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

...a far more palatable - and, in many cases, more successful - form of femininity: the lifestyle supermom...they've built tremendously successful brands by embracing the 'new domesticity,' defined by consumption, maternity, and a sort of twenty-first century gentility. ~ Anne Helen Petersen

I found that I had become so spinsterish that I was made neurotic not only by my life of domesticity but by the slightest derangement of my room. I would burst into a fit of weeping if the kettle was not facing due east. ~ Quentin Crisp

The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie. ~ James Dickey

What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted - ? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster? ~ Donna Tartt

I waited for years for my infatuation to blow over, managing it like a chronic illness. But suppression only sustains and intensifies passion instead of letting it peter out into domesticity, the way the narrow glass canyons of Manhattan Venturi the winds to a pitch that rips umbrellas inside out. Kati Jo used to say she wished Lauren and I could just fuck so I'd get it out of my system, but I never wanted anything as feasible as an affair. I never imagined that Lauren might leave her husband, or entertained shameful little daydreams about his death. The only scenario I could plausibly picture that would bring us together was not Lars's death but my own. I would contract some painless terminal illness that would entitle me to ask Lauren to sit at my bedside in my last months and read to me or bring me little sandwiches. I couldn't envision any realistic way of changing this world; what I wanted was to live in a different one. I was never really a reformer, but a utopian. ~ Tim Kreider

If a woman is not fit to manage the internal matters of a house, she is fit for nothing, and should never be put in a house or over a house, any way. Good housekeeping lies at he root of all the real ease and satisfaction in existence. ~ Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford

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

There was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own.
Seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting - set against the rich productions, the food, flowers, and knitted garments, of other women's domesticity. It became harder to say that it was worth the trouble. ~ Alice Munro

Nowhere is the English genius of domesticity more notably evident than in the festival of afternoon tea. The [ ... ] chink of cups and the saucers tunes the mind to happy repose. ~ George Gissing

The liberation of women from exclusive domesticity did not originate in feminist books, or a war, or a big inflation, although they contributed to its progress. The rising enrollment of women in the paid labor force is a straightforward consequence of the industrial revolution of two hundred years ago. ~ Barbara Bergmann

Most women would say they relate to 'Hedda Gabler' - there's a part of her in them. Ibsen was writing about a deep ambivalence that many women feel about domesticity. I think about myself and friends of mine - we have some of Hedda's qualities and traits. ~ Annette Bening

Marriage, it seemed to me, walled my favorite fictional women off from the worlds in which they had once run free, or, if not free, then at least forward, with currents of narrative possibility at their backs. It was often at just the moment that their educations were complete and their childhood ambitions coming into focus that these troublesome, funny girls were suddenly contained, subsumed, and reduced by domesticity. ~ Rebecca Traister

This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little god of domesticity, whose presence turns a house into a home. ~ Agnes Repplier

Haunted house fictions play upon the complex fears and concerns about domestic issues that women have long grappled with. ~ Lisa Kröger

She'd been a hard taskmistress - How can you be a grown-up if you can't look after yourself? she'd challenged - but she had taught him what no Greek mother ever taught a son: the basic humdrum skills required for independence. ~ Alison Fell

Girls are not only being denied access to scientific and adventurous toys, they're also presented with such a narrow range of options that domesticity and stereotypically "female" duties are shoved down their throats before they've even reached the age of five. ~ Laura Bates

[Leslie Bennett] You have a teenager who desperately wants to separate ... If you don't have a career, these New Domesticity types are likely to find themselves standing in the kitchen with all these domestic skills and no outlet for them, no way to earn a living ... [A]t that point your kids are not thanking you for having made the hand-pureed baby food and for giving them homemade cookies. They don't feel you've done them a big favor; they say, Why didn't she ever grow up and take responsibility for her own life? ~ Emily Matchar

The idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic, of one man one house - this remains the real vision and magnet of mankind. The world may accept something more official and general, less human and intimate. But the world will be like a broken-hearted woman who makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy one; Socialism may be the world's deliverance, but it is not the world's desire. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

For even now the drums were in our blood, we sat forward almost hearing them across the bay, and the van raced on through the streets so that the driver could hustle back for another load of pleasure-seekers, so bent on pleasure they were driving right through Happiness, it seemed, a quieter brand of existence that flourished under these green elms. We kept driving right through all the dappled domesticity, like prisoners, indeed, being moved from jail to jail imprisoned in our own sophistication. ~ Andrew Holleran

I romanticized domesticity for a while, and loved having a shopping list of groceries stuck to the fridge for the first time. ~ Liberty Ross

As millions of women have done before me, I pulled domesticity over my head like a blanket and found I was still cold. ~ Peg Bracken

It was not so much fun. His work became confused with Nicole's problems; in addition, her income had increased so fast of late that it seemed to belittle his work. Also, for the purpose of her cure, he had for many years pretended to a rigid domesticity from which he was drifting away, and the pretence became more arduous in this effortless immobility, in which he was inevitably subjected to microscopic examination. When Dick could no longer play what he wanted to play on the piano, it was an indication that life was bring refined down to a point. He stayed in the big room a long time, listening to the buzz of the electric clock, listening to time. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

The eighteenth-century view of the garden was that it should lead the observer to the enjoyment of the aesthetic sentiments of regularity and order, proportion, colour and utility, and, furthermore, be capable of arousing feelings of grandeur, gaiety, sadness, wildness, domesticity, surprise and secrecy. ~ Penelope Hobhouse

Like a night when the energy is bloody unsalvageable but the show must et cetera. Domesticity. Times when one wonders if Medea is a tragedy or goddamn wish fulfillment. ~ Brian McGreevy

After the war, when my husband came home, we had two more children, and domesticity for a while prevailed combined with beginning the work I had always wanted to do, which was writing a book. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Oh, there's so much ego with men; in their head, they can't possibly think about Tesco's when they are doing Othello. Er, why not? They want to think that they are such geniuses they can't muddy their day with domesticity, and I've got no truck with it whatsoever. ~ Lesley Manville

You mentioned that Palermo, the part of Buenos Aires where you were brought up, had been a violent place full of bohemians and bandits. There they had two names for the knife, 'the blade' and 'the slicer'. The two names described the same object, but 'the blade' was the thing itself, and 'the slicer' described its function. 'The blade' could fit in the hand even of a sickly child shut up in his father's library, 'the blade' could be any of the superannuated daggers and swords belonging to his warrior grandfather or great-grandfather and displayed on the walls of his house, but 'the slicer', the knife in the hand slicing back and forth, in and out, existed only in his imagination, in a fascinating world of rapid settlings of accounts and duels over honor, an insult or a woman, in dark street where you never went, where no writer went, except in the literature he wrote.

'I've always felt that in order to be a great writer, one should have the experience of life at sea, which is why Conrad and Melville and, in a way, Stevenson, who ended his days in the South Seas, were better than all of us, Vogelstein. At sea, a writer flees from the minor demons and faces only the definitive ones. A character in Conrad says that he has a horror of ports because, in port, ships rot and men go to the devil. He meant the devils of domesticity and incoherence, the small devils of terra firma. But I think that having experience of "the slicer" would give a writer the same sensation as g ~ Luis Fernando Verissimo

As soon as a woman's primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women. ~ Naomi Wolf

I never mind the accusations of domesticity, as long as people recognise that all of us, even the luckiest, will live lives in which we have our hearts broken, suffer the loss of loved ones, worry ourselves half to death about our kids. ~ Nick Hornby

Did any great genius ever enter the world in the wake of commonplace pre-natal conditions? Was a maker of history ever born amidst the pleasant harmonies of a satisfied domesticity? Of a mother who was less than remarkable, although she may have escaped being great? Did a woman with no wildness in her blood ever inform a brain with electric fire? The students of history know that while many mothers of great men have been virtuous, none have been commonplace, and few have been happy. ~ Gertrude Atherton

Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea. ~ Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Some men are born husbands; they have a passion for domesticity, for a fireside, for a home. Yet, curiously, these men very rarely stay at home. Apparently what they want is to have a place to get away from. ~ Ada Leverson

The nest may be constructed, so far as the sticks go, by the male bird; but only the hen can line it with moss and down! ~ Frances Power Cobbe

No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction. ~ Samuel Johnson

I must confess that in all the times I read Madame Bovary, I never noticed the heroine's rainbow eyes. Should I have? Would you? Was I perhaps too busy noticing things that Dr Starkie was missing (though what they might have been I can't for the moment think)? Put it another way: is there a perfect reader somewhere, a total reader? Does Dr Starkie's reading of Madame Bovary contain all the responses which I have when I read the book, and then add a whole lot more, so that my reading is in a way pointless? Well, I hope not. My reading might be pointless in terms of the history of literary criticism; but it's not pointless in terms of pleasure. I can't prove that lay readers enjoy books more than professional critics; but I can tell you one advantage we have over them. We can forget. Dr Starkie and her kind are cursed with memory: the books they teach and write about can never fade from their brains. They become family. Perhaps this is why some critics develop a faintly patronising tone towards their subjects. They act as if Flaubert, or Milton, or Wordsworth were some tedious old aunt in a rocking chair, who smelt of stale powder, was only interested in the past, and hadn't said anything new for years. Of course, it's her house, and everybody's living in it rent free; but even so, surely it is, well, you know…time?
Whereas the common but passionate reader is allowed to forget; he can go away, be unfaithful with other writers, come back and be entranced again. Domesticity ~ Julian Barnes

The cat is the only animal which accepts the comforts but rejects the bondage of domesticity. ~ Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon

Loaded my black patent leather bag with sherry, cream cheese (for grammy's apricot tarts), thyme, basil, bay leaves (for Wendy's exotic stews - a facsimile of which now simmers on the stove), golden wafers (such an elegant name for Ritz crackers), apples and green pears.
I was getting worried about becoming too happily stodgily practical: instead of studying Locke, for instance, or writing - I go make an apple pie, or study the Joy of Cooking, reading it like a rare novel. Whoa, I said to myself. You will escape into domesticity & stifle yourself by falling headfirst into a bowl of cookie batter. ~ Sylvia Plath

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 Garcia Marquez

Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love. We oldies yearn daily and hourly for conversation and a renewed domesticity, for company at the movies or while visiting a museum, for someone close by in the car when coming home at night. ~ Roger Angell

Of all modern notions, the worst is this: that domesticity is dull. Inside the home, they say, is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and variety. But the truth is that the home is the only place of liberty, the only spot on earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim. The home is not the one tame place in a world of adventure; it is the one wild place in a world of rules and set tasks. ~ G.K. Chesterton

... the traditional family structure that More supported in her writings enabled women to 'be intelligent, rational, virtuous, and noble creatures, capable of great intellectual and moral achievements. They had the potential for immense influence on their husbands and sons, on their relations, their servants, and the poor.' More held, therefore, ... 'the ideal of rational domesticity helped to liberate the individual within a supportive family framework. ~ Karen Swallow Prior

The [commercial] strip is marketed with the come-on of comfort (the Comfort Inn) and with the promise of a home on the road, a home where nobody knows your name and they're glad to see you as long as you can pay. The strip lives in the contradiction of the name Home Depot - domesticity on a gargantuan scale. Home - "a person's native place," "at ease," "deep; to the heart," says the dictionary, and Depot, "a storehouse or a 'warehouse.'" (Warehouse of the Heart?) ~ Howard Mansfield

Women do act their part when they do make their ordered houses know them. ~ James Sheridan Knowles

Father, mother, child, are the human trinity, whose substance must not be divided nor its persons confounded. As well reconstruct your granite out of the grains it is disintegrated into as society out of the dissolution of wedded love. ~ C. A. Bartol

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

How could anything be the same? The red of blood lay over the market road in slick pools mingled with a yellow spread of dal someone must have brought in anticipation of a picnic after the parade, and there were flies on it, left behind odd slippers, and a sad pair of broken spectacles, even a tooth. It was rather like the government warning about safety that appeared in the cinema before the movie with the image of a man cycling to work, a poor man but with a wife who loved him, and she had sent his lunch with him in a tiffin container; then came a blowing of horns and small, desperate cycle tinkle, and a messy blur clearing into the silent still image of a spread of food mingled with blood. Those mismatched colors, domesticity shuffled with death, sureness running into the unexpected, kindness replaced by the image of violence, always made the cook feel like throwing up and weeping both together. ~ Kiran Desai

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

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

Women owe Friedan an incalculable debt for The Feminine Mystique. Domesticity was not a satisfactory story of an intelligent woman's life. ~ Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

I know there are writers who feel unhappy with domesticity and who even manufacture domestic turmoil in order to have something to write about. With me, though, the happier I feel, the better I write. ~ Paul Theroux

What compromises women - babies, domesticity, mediocrity - compromises writing even more. ~ Rachel Cusk

A house is a kind of box you put a girl in. ~ Catherynne M. Valente