Expat Housewife Quotes

Even the worst days have an ending, and the best days have a beginning. ~ Jennifer Coletta

Jamie Oliver's lunch is soup, half a papaya with lime, ciabatta with mozzarella and prosciutto. The dear boy is not sharing the same planet as the rest of us. Is this lunacy supposed to be a practical suggestion for a harassed housewife trying to drag her children off to school? ~ Terry Wogan

I was born Pauline Matthews and grew up in Bradford as one of three children - I had an older brother, David, and an older sister, Betty. My father Fred worked in the mills as a textile weaving supervisor, and my mother, Mary, was a housewife. ~ Kiki Dee

There's ups and downs of any job. If you worked at the post office, there's ups and downs. You have your good days, and you have your bad days. If you're a housewife, you have your good days, and you have your bad days. ~ Tracy Morgan

Prostitutes don't sell their bodies, they rent their bodies. Housewives sell their bodies when they get married ... ~ Florynce Kennedy

Truth is what every man sees lurking at the bottom of his own soul, like the oyster shell housewives put in the kitchen kettle to collect the lime from the water. By and by each man's iridescent oyster shell of Truth becomes coated with the lime of prejudice and hearsay. ~ Christopher Morley

In East Germany it was very normal for a woman to go out and work even if she had children. A few weeks after giving birth women would return to their normal working life. We never had housewives in East Germany. ~ Christian Schwochow

I don't know how it's going for my sisters, but as my 40s and Verizon bills and mortgage payments roll on, I seem to have an ever more recurring 1950s housewife fantasy. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

No labourer in the world is expected to work for room, board, and love -except the housewife. ~ Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Now, Ani." Whitney was doing that thing I hate, pronouncing my name "Annie" instead of "Ah-nee." "Luke says the wedding is in Nantucket. Why there?" Because of the privilege inherent in the location, Whitney. Because Nantucket transcends all classes, all areas of the country. Go to South Dakota and tell some sad smug housewife you grew up on the Main Line, and she doesn't know she's supposed to be impressed. Tell her you summer on Nantucket - be sure to verb it like that - and she knows who the fuck she's dealing with. That's why, Whitney. ~ Jessica Knoll

Being a housewife, makes women sick.It may therefore be that married women say they are happy because they are sick.To be happy in a relationship which imposes so many impediments on her, as traditional marriage does, women must be slightly mentally ill ~ Jessie Bernard

What are you going to do for a living? Yea, you're going to have to work because you can't be a housewife. Somebody has to marry you before you can be a housewife. And you, you are a plant. Do you know that? That's all you are if you don't talk. If you don't talk, you can't have a personality. You'll have no personality and no hair. You've got to let people know you have a personality and a brain. You think somebody is going to take care of you all your stupid life? You think you'll always have your big sister? You think somebody's going to marry you, is that it? Well you're not the type that gets dates, let alone gets married. Nobody's going to notice you. And you have to talk for interviews, speak right up in front of the boss. Don't you know that? ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

I am all of my characters, but none of them in particular. I'm an expat in San Miguel de Allende, the community I write about.
My characters are never black and white--I'm interested in shades of gray and the way people rationalize the bad acts they commit. ~ John Scherber

When Pat Schroeder, a Harvard Law graduate, ran for office in 1972, the headlines read "Housewife" or "Mother" runs for Congress. When facing one indignant male colleague after another who demanded how she could be both a member of Congress and a mother, she said, "Because I have a brain and a uterus and both work. ~ Myra MacPherson

Indeed the worthy housewife was of such a capricious nature, that she not only attained a higher pitch of genius than Macbeth, in respect of her ability to be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, loyal and neutral in an instant, but would sometimes ring the changes backwards and forwards on all possible moods and flights in one short quarter of an hour; performing, as it were, a kind of triple bob major on the peal of instruments in the female belfry, with a skilfulness and rapidity of execution that astonished all who heard her. ~ Charles Dickens

I would be content being a housewife if I could find the kind of man who wouldn't treat me like one. ~ Terry McMillan

Any honest housewife would sort them out,/ Having a nose for fish, an eye for apples. ~ Robert Graves

I do not refer to myself as a 'housewife' for the reason that I did not marry a house. ~ Wilma Scott Heide

She felt lately as though she had served her purpose, done her job, and been dispensed with, not only by her children, but by her husband as well. ~ Danielle Steel

My father was a chemist on the Yale faculty, my mother a housewife. ~ George Akerlof

American women were frustrated in just the role of housewife - but they also managed to enlarge it. And they weren't just housewives, they were community leaders. ~ Betty Friedan

I'm an FFH: a Formerly Fat Housewife. ~ Jean Nidetch

Kos had different tastes. He was on the lookout for that Midwestern housewife attending a conference with her husband. There was usually at least one in the hotel bar. She was always seated in a corner drinking a cocktail and pretending to read a novel while her husband was off doing manly things. Kos knew something Mason didn't - stewardesses partied in every port, but housewives were still waiting for the party. ~ Amber Belldene

I'm very obsessed with 'The Real Housewives' franchise. It's a bad obsession. ~ Vanessa Marano

I. At Tea
THE kettle descants in a cosy drone,
And the young wife looks in her husband's face,
And then in her guest's, and shows in her own
Her sense that she fills an envied place;
And the visiting lady is all abloom,
And says there was never so sweet a room.
And the happy young housewife does not know
That the woman beside her was his first choice,
Till the fates ordained it could not be so ...
Betraying nothing in look or voice
The guest sits smiling and sips her tea,
And he throws her a stray glance yearningly. ~ Thomas Hardy

He's a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices. ~ Gore Vidal

And, oh God, in my misspent youth as a housewife, I, too, used to bake bread, in those hectic and desolating days just prior to the woman's movement, when middle-class women were supposed to be wonderful wives and mothers, gracious hostesses ... I used to feel so womanly when I was baking my filthy bread. ~ Angela Carter

Ultimately, it's not my job to judge the 'Housewives' - we don't editorialize on the show; we really leave it to the audience. We have a certain wink, which is the Bravo wink. We may linger on a shot or we may let something play out longer, but we leave it to you. ~ Andy Cohen

I have too much imagination to be a housewife ~ Marilyn Monroe

The children themselves, before they get access to a car, are captives of their suburb, save for those families where the housewives surrender continuity in their own lives to chauffeur their children to lessons, doctors, and other services that could be reached via public transport in the city. ~ David Riesman

"Repeat that?"
"It's National Talk Like a Pirate Day. Didn't you know?"
"Somehow I missed the memo."
"You mean, 'Somehow I missed the memo, arrr!'"
"Precisely. Arr. So, Mrs. Jack ... Er, is that still your name? Or, I tremble to ask, have you adopted a pirate identity?"
"Arr, matey, of course I have! It's ... " She pulled an eggplant from the grocery bag. "Captain Eggplantier." She needed to stop speaking the first words that popped into her mind.
"Captain Eggplanteir." He sounded very doubtful.
"That's right. A family name. It's Belgian. ~ Shannon Hale

In the back of the fridge I checked out some stewed apples destined to fester. I examined them closely and reckoned they had only a day to go, even by my standards. I spooned the apples into tiny bowls, tossed in some dried fruit and sprinkled them with crumble topping. Delicious, they said that night, scraping the bowls so clean they hardly needed to go in the dishwasher. The fools. ~ Helen Brown

I love the romance of what I do, although because of Isabella, Lady Gaga and Grace Jones, people think I have crazy customers. Sometimes I get more enthusiasm from the housewife who wants a hat and believes in it. ~ Philip Treacy

It was a woman in Minnesota who clarified this shift for me. She pointed out that her mother called herself a housewife. She, on the other hand, called herself a stay at home mom. The change in nomenclature reflects the shift in cultural emphasis: the pressures on women have gone from keeping an immaculate house to being an irreproachable mom … Back in the fifties, women were told to master the differences between oven cleaners and floor wax and special sprays for wood; today they're told to master the differences between toys that hone problem solving skills and those that encourage imaginative play. ~ Jennifer Senior

Name?" the desk clerk said to me politely, her pencil poised.
"Name," I said vaguely. I remembered, and told her.
"Age?" she asked. "Sex? Occupation?"
"Writer," I said.
"Housewife," she said.
"Writer," I said.
"I'll just put down housewife," she said. ~ Shirley Jackson

This is the Hong Kong curse that expat housewives talk about in hushed voices: the man who takes to Hong Kong the wrong way. He moves from an egalitarian American society, where he's supposed to take out the trash every day and help with the dinner dishes, to a place where women cater to his every desire - a secretary who anticipates his needs before he does, a servant in the house who brings him his espresso just the way he likes it and irons his boxers and his socks - and the local population is not as sassy with the comebacks as where he came from, so, of course, he then looks for that in every corner of his life. ~ Janice Y.K. Lee

In spring, nature is like a thrifty housewife ... taking up the white carpets and putting down the green ones. ~ Mary Baker Eddy

Men - ' said Miss Williams, and stopped.
As a rich property owner says 'Bolsheviks' - as an earnest Communist says 'Capitalists!' - as a good housewife says 'Blackbeetles' - so did Miss Williams say 'Men! ~ Agatha Christie

Accept success as a good thing, and invite it into your life.
Set today as the starting point for a new life.
Every race starts at one point.
Every building starts with one stone.
Every great work, every dream, every great achievement starts somewhere.
The march of a thousand miles begins with one step, said Confucius.
Everyone, absolutely everyone, have to start the walk somewhere.
It does not matter where you are right now.
It does not matter if you are a student, a professional, a housewife, a peasant coming to the city looking for a better life.
It does not matter if you are unemployed and out of work (or as I like to refer to it: awaiting for a really wonderful and transformative life experience that I was not having in my former employment).
What matters is not if you have a lot or have a little; but what you decide to do with what you have. ~ Mauricio Chaves Mesen

Oh, God", he thought, "what a strenuous career it is that I've chosen! Travelling day in and day out. Doing business like this takes much more effort than doing your own business at home, and on top of that there's the curse of travelling, worries about making train connections, bad and irregular food, contact with different people all the time so that you can never get to know anyone or become friendly with them. It can all go to Hell! ~ Franz Kafka

Although the cooking of food presents some unsolved problems, the quick warming of cooked food and the thawing of frozen food both open up some attractive uses ... There is no important reason why the the housewife of the future should not purchase completely frozen meals at the grocery store just as she buys quick frozen vegetables. With a quick heating, high-frequency unit in her kitchen, food preparation from a pre-cooked, frozen meal becomes a simple matter. ~ Chauncey Guy Suits

The truth was, she was afraid that when she fell hard for a boy, she'd lose herself along the way. She'd seen it happen to lots of girls. They'd go from drinking gin, driving fast cars, and boldly shimmying in speakeasies to these passive creatures who couldn't make a move without asking their beaus if it would be okay. Evie had no intention of fading behind any man. She didn't want to slide into ordinary and wake up to find that she'd become a housewife in Ohio with a bitter face and an embalmed spirit. Besides, things you loved deeply could be lost in a second, and then there was no filling the hole left inside you. So she lived in the moment, as if her life were one long party that never had to stop as long as she kept the good times going.
But right now, in this moment, she felt a strong connection to Sam, as if they were the only two people in the world. She wanted to hold on to both him and the beautiful moment and not let go. ~ Libba Bray

My type of humor is almost pure identification. A housewife reads my column and says, 'But that's happened to ME! I know just what she's talking about! ~ Erma Bombeck

Not long after he moved, the mail carrier got embroiled in a battle with the Middletown government over the flock of chickens that he kept in his yard. He treated them just as Mamaw had treated her chickens back in the holler: Every morning he collected all the eggs, and when his chicken population grew too large, he'd take a few of the old ones, wring their necks, and carve them up for meat right in his backyard. You can just imagine a well-bred housewife watching out the window in horror as her Kentucky-born neighbor slaughtered squawking chickens just a few feet away. My sister and I still call the old mail carrier "the chicken man," and years later even a mention of how the city government ganged up on the chicken man could inspire Mamaw's trademark vitriol: "Fucking zoning laws. They can kiss my ruby-red asshole." The ~ J.D. Vance

It was a different sense of isolation from what he normally felt in Japan. And not such a bad feeling, he decided. Being alone in two senses of the word was maybe like a double negation of isolation. In other words, it made perfect sense for him, a foreigner, to feel isolated here. The thought calmed him. He was in exactly the right place. ~ Haruki Murakami

You know, if Tony had turned you over his knee more often instead of spoiling you rotten, you'd be a happy housewife now, instead of playing at detective and making it harder for us to get our job done.

But I'm a happy detective, Bobby, and I made a lousy housewife. ~ Sara Paretsky

Well, at least she doesn't have to be a housewife the rest of her life," she said. "What in the hell do you have against housewives?" I said. "I was raised by one," Savannah said. "And it almost ruined my life." "I got knocked around by a shrimper when I was a kid," said Luke, "but I never blamed the shrimp. ~ Pat Conroy