Housework Quotes

1. "This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there's someone else to do the housework."
Author: Ben Aaronovitch

2. "What Friedan gave to the world was, "the problem that has no name." She not only named it but dissected it. The advances of science, the development of labor-saving appliances, the development of the suburbs: all had come together to offer women in the 1950s a life their mothers had scarcely dreamed of, free from rampant disease, onerous drudgery, noxious city streets. But the green lawns and big corner lots were isolating, the housework seemed to expand to fill the time available, and polio and smallpox were replaced by depression and alcoholism. All that was covered up in a kitchen conspiracy of denial...[i]nstead the problem was with the mystique of waxed floors and perfectly applied lipstick."
Author: Betty Friedan

3. "My revulsion kicked in. Sexual domination, sure. Dishes, housework, even cooking for a man, all these for some weird reason repulsed me."
Author: Cari Silverwood

4. "I won't even mention the swift, transitory reward of lemon spray wax. Danielle Westerman and I have discussed the matter of housework. Not surprisingly, she, always looking a little dérisoire, believes that women have been enslaved by their possessions. Acquiring and then tending--these eat up a woman's creativity, anyone's creativity. But I've been watching the ways she arranges articles on a shelf, and how carefully she sets a table, even with it is just me coming into Toronto to have lunch in her sunroom."
Author: Carol Shields

5. "To hell with housework, our top priority has always been between our legs."
Author: Chuck Palahniuk

6. "My girlfriend is much better than I am at working hard then resting, and she demands that from me, too. She insists on having time when we don't do anything. We leave the housework and watch a movie."
Author: Cynthia Nixon

7. "The cruel irony of housework: people only notice when you don't do it."
Author: Danielle Raine

8. "Gro Rollag was no beauty, but she was a strong capable young woman with a long face, prominent cheekbones, high forehead, and a kindly intelligent look in her rather narrow eyes. According to family lore, she was not the most conscientious housekeeper because she preferred reading to housework. A love of books and reading ran in the family. Of all the possessions they were forced to sell or leave behind in Norway, what the Rollags remembered with deepest regret was the library they inherited from an eighteenth-century ancestor - lovely old books sold to pay for their passage to America."
Author: David Laskin

9. "You don't want a general houseworker, do you? Or a traveling companion, quiet, refined, speaks fluent French entirely in the present tense? Or an assistant billiard-maker? Or a private librarian? Or a lady car-washer? Because if you do, I should appreciate your giving me a trial at the job. Any minute now, I am going to become one of the Great Unemployed. I am about to leave literature flat on its face. I don't want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading."
Author: Dorothy Parker

10. "That day, instead, I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighbourhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swallen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts (...) they appeared to have lost those feminine qualities that were so important to us girls (...) They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labors or the arrival of old age, of illness. When did that transformation begin? With housework? With pregnancies? With beatings?"
Author: Elena Ferrante

11. "We grow up going to school, where you get a gold star, you get the A-plus," she says. "At work you're constantly being evaluated. Then you become a homemaker and suddenly nobody is giving you feedback. Suddenly no one is paying attention to what you're doing. Blogging is a way to get this validation from other people. You put up a recipe and people go, 'Hey, that's a great photograph.'" Clearly blogs can give emotional value to housework. But if a blogger is actually making money from a blog, even a little bit of money, it cane make the blog even more validating."
Author: Emily Matchar

12. "No one likes doing chores. In happiness surveys, housework is ranked down there with commuting as activities that people enjoy the least. Maybe that's why figuring out who does which chores usually prompts, at best, tense discussion in a household and, at worst, outright fighting."
Author: Emily Oster

13. "Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop-offs at tedium and counter productivity."
Author: Erma Bombeck

14. "My theory on housework is, if the item doesn't multiply, smell, catch fire, or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one else cares. Why should you?"
Author: Erma Bombeck

15. "Housework, if you do it right, will kill you."
Author: Erma Bombeck

16. "Housework, if it is done properly, can cause brain damage."
Author: Erma Bombeck

17. "Housework can kill you if done right."
Author: Erma Bombeck

18. "My mother made me do all the housework as a boy. I still do it, even in hotels."
Author: Ernest Borgnine

19. "Housework is what a woman does that nobody notices unless she hasn't done it."
Author: Evan Esar

20. "On every level of life, from housework to heights of prayer, in all judgment and efforts to get things done, hurry and impatience are sure marks of the amateur."
Author: Evelyn Underhill

21. "Whisky, gambling and Ferraris are better than housework."
Author: Françoise Sagan

22. "We can only afford two children' really means, 'We only like clean, well-disciplined middle-class children who go to good schools and grow up to be professionals', for children manage to use up all the capital that is made available for the purpose, whatever proportion it may be of the family's whole income, just as housework expands to fill the time available."
Author: Germaine Greer

23. "Once you get married, women are still implicitly expected to do the majority of the housework and take care of any future children."
Author: Jessica Valenti

24. "If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space."
Author: Joyce Carol Oates

25. "I love it when my justifications for avoiding housework are actually legitimate."
Author: Julie Kenner

26. "You ain't old yet but when you get old, all the women in the village start to look down on you when they find out you want to do something other than sweep the kitchen or cut up vegetables. Had this big starch mango tree when I was small. Anytime I set myself to climb it, there was always a woman passing by to yell at me and tell me to get down. Asked me why I leaving my poor mother to do all the housework. I never got to the top. It was like God was always watching, ready to send another hag to tell me down. Then, one day, they cut down the tree."
Author: K. Jared Hosein

27. "When it comes to housework the one thing no book of household management can ever tell you is how to begin. Or maybe I mean why."
Author: Katharine Whitehorn

28. "As they passed the rows of houses they saw through the open doors that men were sweeping and dusting and washing dishes, while the women sat around in groups, gossiping and laughing.What has happened?' the Scarecrow asked a sad-looking man with a bushy beard, who wore an apron and was wheeling a baby carriage along the sidewalk.Why, we've had a revolution, your Majesty -- as you ought to know very well,' replied the man; 'and since you went away the women have been running things to suit themselves. I'm glad you have decided to come back and restore order, for doing housework and minding the children is wearing out the strength of every man in the Emerald City.'Hm!' said the Scarecrow, thoughtfully. 'If it is such hard work as you say, how did the women manage it so easily?'I really do not know,' replied the man, with a deep sigh. 'Perhaps the women are made of cast-iron."
Author: L. Frank Baum

29. "Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished."
Author: Lois McMaster Bujold

30. "A household has to be tended if it is to flourish and grow. Housework is never 'done' in the same sense that gardening is never done or that God's providential involvement in the world is never done. Housework and gardening and God's providence itself are exercises not in futility but in faithfulness - faithfulness to the work itself, to the people whose needs that work serves, and to the God whose own faithfulness invites our faithful response."
Author: Margaret Kim Peterson

31. "My mother was a wonderful, wonderful woman with a lovely voice who hated housework, hated cooking even more and loved her children. She was always arranging church activities such as a bazaar."
Author: Maureen Forrester

32. "I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened."
Author: Nancy Mitford

33. "Housework can't kill you, but why take a chance?"
Author: Phyllis Diller

34. "There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse."
Author: Quentin Crisp

35. "I began to wonder if girls could marry girls, because I was sure I wanted to marry Leota and look in her green eyes forever. But I would only marry her if I didn't have to do the housework. I was certain of that. But if Leota really didn't want to do it either, I guessed I'd do it. I'd do anything for Leota."
Author: Rita Mae Brown

36. "When woman work outside the home and share breadwinning duties, couples are more likely to stay together. In fact, the risk of divorce reduces by about half when a wife earns half the income and a husband does half the housework."
Author: Sheryl Sandberg

37. "Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day."
Author: Simone De Beauvoir

38. "I watched my mother waste her life on housework and swore I'd never do that. Dave does the cooking."
Author: Siobhan Fahey

39. "Except that my father got a raise, and my mother didn't because she doesn't get paid for housework, and my sister stopped reading those self-esteem books because she met a new boy"
Author: Stephen Chbosky

40. "I enjoy doing housework, ironing, washing, cooking, dishwashing. Whenever I get one of those questionaires and they ask what is your profession, I always put down housewife. It's an admirable profession, why apologize for it. You aren't stupid because you're a housewife. When you're stirring the jam you can read Shakespeare."
Author: Tasha Tudor

41. "Nanny Ogg never did any housework herself, but she was the cause of housework in other people."
Author: Terry Pratchett

42. "Yep, and your Internet was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there's no innocence. Anywhere. Never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don't think anything has changed, kid."
Author: Thomas Pynchon

43. "Don't tell anyone at the church this, but I think girls going out with girls is quite sensible. Imagine not having to do all the housework, and if you found a nice girl the same size you'd have double the wardrobe and you'd never have to shave your legs or clean whiskers out of the sink. I don't know why everyone doesn't do it. Not it's fine, provided you stay that way. It's the changing back to men that sends you mad."
Author: Toni Jordan

Housework Quotes Pictures