Domestic Life Quotes

• These fragments I have shored against my ruins

  T. S. Eliot

  Age, Ruins, Nostalgia

  The Waste Land l. 431 (1922)

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• When I think about the reference to baroque, I'm most interested in how art was integrated into domestic life. That's why I like fresco, because fresco is part of the wall. It's art, but it's decoration at the same time.

  Camille Henrot

  Art, Wall, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I don't consider myself an action hero, at all. My domestic life is the same as anyone else's.

  Chris Vance

  Hero, Action, Life Is

  Source: collider.com

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• My novels are high concept. I guess big ideas interest me more than, say, the minutiae of domestic life.

  Scarlett Thomas

  Ideas, Bigs, Minutiae

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• Pleasure is to a woman what the sun is to the flower: if moderately enjoyed, it beautifies, it refreshes, and it improves; if immoderately, it withers, deteriorates, and destroys. But the duties of domestic life, exercised as they must be in retirement, and calling forth all the sensibilities of the female, are perhaps as necessary to the full development of her charms, as the shade and the shower are to the rose, confirming its beauty, and increasing its fragrance.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Retirement, Women, Flower

  Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.81

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• Happy domestic life is like a beautiful summer's evening; the heart is filled with peace; and everything around derives a peculiar glory.

  Hans Christian Andersen

  Happiness, Beautiful, Summer

  Hans Christian Andersen (2013). “The True Story of My Life”, p.143, Lulu Press, Inc

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• Subduing and subdued, the petty strife, Which clouds the colour of domestic life; The sober comfort, all the peace which springs From the large aggregate of little things; On these small cares of daughter, wife or friend, The almost sacred joys of home depend.

  Hannah More

  Daughter, Spring, Women

  Hannah More (1840). “The Miscellaneous Works of Hannah More”, p.205

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• In everyage and country, the wiser, or at least the stronger, ofthetwosexes, hasusurped thepowers ofthe state, and confined the other to the cares and pleasures of domestic life.

  Edward Gibbon

  Country, Stronger, Care

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• The only fountain in the wilderness of life, where man drinks of water totally unmixed with bitterness, is that which gushes for him in the calm and shady recess of domestic life.

  William Penn

  Men, Water, Bitterness

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• A morbid propensity that causes great suffering in domestic life is often curiously infectious to the very person for whom it creates most suffering.

  Ada Leverson

  Suffering, Causes, Life Is

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• To place any dependence upon militia is assuredly resting upon a broken staff. Men just dragged from the tender scenes of domestic life, unaccustomed to the din of arms, totally unacquainted with every kind of military skill ... makes them timid and ready to fly from their own shadows.

  George Washington

  Military, Men, Skills

  George Washington (1871). “Words of Washington”, p.61

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• The domestic life of most classes is relatively shabby, as compared with the éclat of that overt portion of their life that is carried on before the eyes of observers.

  Thorstein Veblen

  Eye, Class, Portions

  Thorstein Veblen (2012). “The Theory of the Leisure Class”, p.77, Courier Corporation

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• I like being able to go to the supermarket and go on the Tube and have an ordinary domestic life. I'd hate to have to protect myself. I'm quite lucky that I can carry on without any intrusions. I don't get given a hard time by anyone.

  Jim Broadbent

  Hate, Hard Times, Ordinary

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• I was quite able at the insignificant work I did in MI6, but absolutely dysfunctional in my domestic life. I had no experience of fatherhood. I had no example of marital bliss or the family unit.

  John le Carre

  Fatherhood, Example, Able

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• Sometimes I get to put on posh frocks and be Madam Glamour, the vendor of my wares. My lovely friend Kath, a stylist, puts me into things I'd never dream of. But my real life is very different. It's very, very home-based - an intense domestic life, that's the core of everything.

  Emma Thompson

  Dream, Real, Home

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• In domestic life the woman's value is inherent, unquantifiable; at home she exchanges proven values for mythological ones. She "wants" to be at home, and because she is a woman she's allowed to want it. This desire is her mystique, it is both what enables her to domesticate herself and what disempowers her.

  Rachel Cusk

  Home, Desire, Want

  "The simmering but stymied rage of stay-at-home mums" by Rachel Cusk, www.theguardian.com. October 9, 2010.

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• I'm not very good at being domesticated. I've tried. The domestic life I find claustrophobic - the rituals and habits and patterns.

  Ralph Fiennes

  Patterns, Habit, Very Good

  "Ralph Fiennes: 'I have huge respect for J.Lo, she was terribly good'". Details interview, www.celebitchy.com. January 17, 2012.

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• I hate the domestic life.

  Daniel Day-Lewis

  Hate, I Hate

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• The General was essentially a man of peace, except in his domestic life.

  Oscar Wilde

  Funny Relationship, Men, Luck

  Oscar Wilde, Peter Raby (2008). “The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays: Lady Windermere's Fan; Salome; A Woman of No Importance; An Ideal Husband; The Importance of Being Earnest”, p.306, Oxford Paperbacks

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• I’ve always liked the feeling of traveling light; there is something in me that wants to feel I could leave wherever I am, at any time, without any effort. The idea of being weighed down made me uneasy, as if I lived on the surface of a frozen lake and each new trapping of domestic life - a pot, a chair, a lamp - threatened to be the thing that sent me through the ice.

  Nicole Krauss

  Lakes, Light, Ice

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• The domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our writing lives; our imaginations are freed, or stimulated, by the very prospect of companionship, quiet, a predictable and consoling routine.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Writing, Imagination, Routine

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• Because of new technologies, new wealth, new conditions of domestic life and of international relations, unprecedented criteria and issues are coming up for national decision.

  Herman Kahn

  Technology, Issues, Decision

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• With my daughter, who at the time was one, my domestic life needed to take more precedent and really with my own self I needed to develop quite a bit more. So that put Blur down the list of priorities quite a lot by the time I came to thinking about it.

  Graham Coxon

  Daughter, Mother, Thinking

  Interview with Alex McCann, designermagazine.tripod.com.

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• It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy; it is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf the whole of mankind without disturbing the domestic life of a single catfish.

  Beryl Markham

  Animal, Men, Elephants

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.227, Open Road Media

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• What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Men, Greek

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.150, Harvard University Press

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