Domestic Life Quotes

“Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you, too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship: in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best -- making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius and fetters the dead to the living. In his realm there is hatred -- secret hatred: there is disgust -- unspoken disgust: there is treachery -- family treachery: there is vice -- deep, deadly, domestic vice. In his dominions, children grow unloving between parents who have never loved: infants are nursed on deception from their very birth: they are reared in an atmosphere corrupt with lies ... All that surrounds him hastens to decay: all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. Your god is a masked Death.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

“I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albóndigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them. That I could find meaning in the intensely personal nature of life as a wife and mother did not seem inconsistent with finding meaning in the vast indifference of geology and the test shots.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“My husband would do anything for me ...' It's degrading. No human being ought to have such power over another."

"It's a very real power, Harriet."

"Then ... we won't use it. If we disagree, we'll fight it out like gentlemen. We won't stand for matrimonial blackmail.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman's Honeymoon

“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

“I had always liked staying the night with other families, having your own room with a freshly made bed, full of unfamiliar objects, with a towel and a washcloth nicely laid out, and from there straight into the heart of family life, despite there always being, no matter whom I visited, an uncomfortable side, because even though people always try to keep existing tensions in the background whenever guests are present, the tensions are still noticeable, and you can never know if it is your presence that has caused them or whether they are just there and indeed your presence is helping to suppress them. A third possibility is, of course, that all these tensions were just tensions that lived their own lives in my head.”
― Knausgaard

“I have been seeing dragons again.
Last night, hunched on a beaver dam,
one held a body like a badly held cocktail;
his tail, keeping the beat of a waltz,
sent a morse of ripples to my canoe.

They are not richly bright
but muted like dawns
or the vague sheen on a fly's wing.
Their old flesh drags in folds
as they drop into grey pools,
strain behind a tree.

Finally the others saw one today, trapped,
tangled in our badminton net.
The minute eyes shuddered deep in the creased face
while his throat, strangely fierce, stretched
to release an extinct burning inside:
pathetic loud whispers as four of us
and the excited spaniel surrounded him.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The Dainty Monsters

“She pauses several treads from the bottom, listening, waiting; she is again possessed (it seems to be getting worse) by a dream-like feeling, as if she is standing in the wings, about to go onstage and perform in a play for which she is not appropriately dressed, and for which she has not adequately rehearsed.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“His wife, Genevieve, had her bare feet up on the sofa, exhausted by the responsibility of coordinating the domestic crisis of Christmas in a house with a dreamy husband, four kids, two dogs, a mare in the paddock, a rabbit, and a guinea pig, plus sundry invading mice and rats that kept finding inventive routes into their kitchen. In many ways it was a house weathering a permanent state of siege.”
― Graham Joyce, Some Kind of Fairy Tale

“Mrs. Dalloway raised her hand to her eyes, and, as the maid shut the door to, and she heard the swish of Lucy's skirts, she felt like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response to old devotions.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“She liked to be in the thick of things and did not delegate easily, except where domestic chores were concerned.”
― Mary Allsebrook, Born to Rebel: The Life of Harriet Boyd Hawes

“Rosamond, accustomed from her childhood to an extravagant household, thought that good housekeeping consisted simply in ordering the best of everything––nothing else 'answered;' and Lydgate supposed that 'if things were done at all, they must be done properly'–he did not see how they were to live otherwise. If each head of household expenditure had been mentioned to him beforehand, he would have probably observed that 'it could hardly come to much,' and if any one had suggested a saving on a particular article–for example, the substitution of cheap fish for dear–it would have appeared to him simply a penny-wise, mean notion.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“I was lounging in the kitchen, enjoying the small fermata between emptying the dishwasher and reloading it. It's a glamorous life.”
― Abbi Waxman, The Garden of Small Beginnings

“Why should such an angel be plunged so low as into the vulgar offices of domestic life? Were she mine, I should hardly wish to see her a mother unless there were a kind of moral certainty that minds like hers could be propagated.”
― Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady

“But I love Sir long time, she'd said repeatedly, blubbering, but I love Sir long time.
The wife got up and slapped her smartly across the face. Love? The wife gave a bark of laughter. What do you think you know about love?”
― Amanda Lee Koe, Ministry of Moral Panic

“October's Double by Stewart Stafford

Light a fire in flinty February,
As the evening time comes down,
Welcome all the family home
With shopping bought from town.

Hear the logs crackle and roll,
And the sparks pop and hiss,
A storm roars down the chimney,
To deliver its tempestuous kiss.

Drowsiness in the living room,
As the expiring embers fade,
Up we go to those clean sheets,
And beds so neatly made.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“সংসারের বাইরে মানুষের কোনো অস্তিত্ব নেই।”
― Shobuj Taposh

“I don’t mind admitting that I had no control in my house at mealtimes. I’d like to say it was because I saved my authority for the bigger things, but I was just trying to get through the day, one hideous hour at a time.”
― Elizabeth McGivern, Amy Cole Has Lost Her Mind

“Some men,” she would add in ominous seriousness, “are nice as pie in public but within their own homes they are mean and miserly to those who have to live with them all the time. No one, perhaps, knows this except those who are captive within their houses.”
― Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief: Adapted from the Novel by Alistair MacLeod

“When we police a woman's affect, when we privilege it or equate it with her actions, with what she actually does, we're engaging in our most pervasive and yet our most quiet form of sexism, our most quiet form of everyday violence.”
― Toni Jensen, Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land