Quotations about Housework, Chores, and Yardwork
Dusting is a waste of time — it is just taking specks off one thing and putting them on another. ~Marion Hill, Harmony Hall, 1910
A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Cleaning your house
While your kids are still growing
Is like shoveling the walk
Before it stops snowing.
THE SLOPPY HOUSEKEEPER'S ALMANAC
~Phyllis Diller, "How To Get The Chenille Marks Off Your Face When The Doorbell Rings," Phyllis Diller's Housekeeping Hints, 1966
...there was no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse. ~Quentin Crisp
Th' feller that owns his own home is allus jist comin' out o' a hardware store. ~Kin Hubbard ("Abe Martin")
By then most of the leaves have fallen. That's the final job, those leaves. You can wait only for so long for the wind to blow them away. Eventually you have to get out the rake and go to work. ~Hal Borland, "Wild Goose Call," November 1967
We labor to make a house a home, then every time we're expecting visitors, we rush to turn it back into a house. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
You may feel that you are only patching up the house a little, so that it will be more comfortable to live in, but what you are really doing is inviting good temper, cool judgment, a happy heart, and the joy of life to come and dwell with you. ~Franklin Berry
Plain Sewing and Cooking are so old-fashioned that they are fast becoming new Fads. ~Minna Thomas Antrim (1861–1950), Don'ts for Bachelors and Old Maids, 1908
I am afraid I shall be too busy washing my dishes to pay many visits. The washing of dishes does seem to me the most absurd and unsatisfactory business that I ever undertook. If, when once washed, they would remain clean for ever and ever (which they ought in all reason to do, considering how much trouble it is), there would be less occasion to grumble; but no sooner is it done, than it requires to be done again. On the whole, I have come to the resolution not to use more than one dish at each meal. However, I moralize deeply on this and other matters, and have discovered that all the trouble and affliction in the world comes from the necessity of cleansing away our earthly stains. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1844
A new broom sweeps clean but the old broom knows the corners. ~Proverb
The distant lawnmower scents the air with green. ~Derek Jarman (1942–1994), "Green Fingers," Chroma: A Book of Colour —
The best way to keep teenagers out of hot water is to put some dishes in it. ~Arnold H. Glasow (1905–1999)
There were times, indeed, when the vigor she put into her work was more of a relief to her feelings than it was an ardor to efface dirt... ~Eleanor H. Porter, Pollyanna, 1912
One says she can't see why road building is expensive. She says her husband could track in dirt for them for almost nothing. ~Thomas Benjamin "Tom" Sims, 1925
...this endless struggle without victory over the dirt... 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. ~Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949, translated and edited by H. M. Parshley, 1953
My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint. ~Erma Bombeck
...housework, if it is done right, can kill you. ~John Skow, about the message of Erma Bombeck's early columns in the 1960s, "Erma in Bomburbia," in Time, 1984
I am an immaculate housekeeper. I'm clean, but the house is a mess. ~Phyllis Diller, "How To Get The Chenille Marks Off Your Face When The Doorbell Rings," Phyllis Diller's Housekeeping Hints, 1966
[A]s a child... we had such a bad vacuum. When you vacuumed the living room, it would groan and stop and you had to sit and wait for it to groan and start up, then vacuum like mad before it quit again, but it didn't have good suction either. You had to stuff the hairballs into it. ~Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days, 1985, garrisonkeillor.com [My family had this same vacuum cleaner!
...old Houses mended,
Cost little less than new, before they're ended...
~Colley Cibber, The Double Gallant: or, The Sick Lady's Cure, 1707
Spring Cleaning! A most idiotic name! Any man could tell you it's actually spring dirtying. All the dust that has settled down quietly, and doesn't show and only asks to be left alone, germs and all, is stirred up. Everybody is choked and as far as possible infected. Instead of being under the carpet, it's on your furniture and in your food. There's nowhere to sleep and nothing to eat; nowhere even to sit down. The moment you try disaster comes. You are told to get out of the way; you are pushed here and there; you step in things you are warned to avoid; you—oh, confound it all!... It's not till the next spring cleaning comes round that you find your most treasured possessions, and then the cleaner sees to it that you lose them again instantly. ~Edward Burke, "How Wives Are So Untidy," My Wife, 1917
A plumber's pipe dream is a dream of a broken pipe. ~Thomas Benjamin "Tom" Sims
I think there is a higher likelihood of me winning the Nobel Prize in physics than there is of me ever learning to successfully fold a fitted sheet. ~Keith Wynn, 2018
The Storm abates where Walls are Weatherproof;
The Deluge pours upon the Leaky Roof.
~Arthur Guiterman, "Of Buildings," A Poet's Proverbs, 1924
Always keep your home presentable, assuming you keep a home for purposes of presentation. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule. ~Michael Pollan, Second Nature, 1991, michaelpollan.com
Well, housecleanin' time is with us once more;
And, landsakes alive, it's an awful chore!
What with scrubbin', rubbin', and washin' paint,
It's not any picnic; you bet it ain't!...
For it has to be done each Spring and Fall:
The attic and cellar, bedrooms and hall.
Each room, in its order, gives up its dirt,
Till I am weary and my back does hurt!
~Gertrude Tooley Buckingham, "Housecleanin' Time," 1940s
I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges or scrub the floor. ~D. H. Lawrence, 1913
DUST Mud with the juice squeezed out. ~Charles Wayland Towne, The Foolish Dictionary, Executed by Gideon Wurdz, Master of Pholly, Doctor of Loquacious Lunacy, etc., 1904
Dust is particles of the past. If you clean, you're wiping away all those good memories. ~Terri Guillemets
Houses are the opposites of ourselves, and begin their existence by being skeletons. ~Charles Searle, Look Here!, 1885
Dust hangs clogged so thick
The air has a dusty taste:
Spider threads cling to my face,
From the broad pine-beams.
~John Gould Fletcher, "The Ghosts of an Old House: The Attic"
I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground. ~Henry David Thoreau
There is no daily chore so trivial that it cannot be made important by skipping it two days running. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Husbands are things that wives have to get used to putting up with,
And with whom they breakfast with and sup with...
And when it's a question of walking five miles to play golf they are very energetic but if it's doing anything useful around the house they are very lethargic,
And then they tell you that women are unreasonable and don't know anything about logic...
~Ogden Nash (1902–1971), "What Almost Every Woman Knows Sooner or Later"
Sometimes clean feels empty. A bit of clutter and dirt gladdens the heart and affirms a life in progress. ~Terri Guillemets
Rural and suburban householders are busy now with rake and fork and harrow, cleaning and neatening the dooryard, the lawn, and the garden. Everything must be in order for the winter. But down the road and across the valley, where autumn itself is in charge, nobody is bothering about the unkempt look...
Man must rake and cart away, to soothe his conscience and proclaim his tenancy. Nature doesn't bother. The tree thrives on its own trash and the seed sprouts in its parent's midden heap. Each new spring grows on autumn's leftovers. ~Hal Borland, "Autumn's Leftovers," November 1975
What's th' good of havin' any yard?
Pushin' a lawn mower 's awful hard.
Pa an' ma they talk, an' both look wise,
Sayin' it will give me exercise.
Ain't I gettin' exercise enough?
Bet you pa ain't muscled half as tough!
We raise grass enough for all th' town—
Soon as it comes up we cut it down!
~Wilbur D. Nesbit, "The Queerness of Parents," in Clare A. Briggs, When a Feller Needs a Friend, 1914
And Cousin Eunice doesn't have just a plain parlor at home to receive her beaux in; she has a studio. A studio is a room full of things that catch dust. ~Kate Trimble Sharber (b.1883), The Annals of Ann, 1910
Scrub and polish,—sweep and clean,—
Fling your windows wide!
See, the trees are clad in green!
Coax the spring inside!
Home, be shining fair to-day
For the guest whose name is May!
~Louise Bennett Weaver and Helen Cowles LeCron, "May," A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband with Bettina's Best Recipes, 1917 [Spring cleaning!
Home would not be home to me without a lawn... Consider the many special delights a lawn affords: soft mattress for a creeping baby; worm hatchery for a robin; croquet or badminton court; baseball diamond; restful green perspectives leading the eye to a background of flower beds, shrubs, or hedge; green shadows — 'This lawn, a carpet all alive / With shadows flung from leaves' — as changing and as spellbinding as the waves of the sea, whether flecked with sunlight under trees of light foliage, like elm and locust, or deep, dark, solid shade, moving slowly as the tide, under maple and oak. This carpet! What pleasanter surface on which to walk, sit, lie, or even to read Tennyson? ~Katharine S. White (1892–1977), "For the Recreation & Delight of the Inhabitants," Onward and Upward in the Garden, 1962
At Cleaning Time with Proud or Mean
The Woman with the Broom is Queen.
~Arthur Guiterman, "Of Cleanliness," A Poet's Proverbs, 1924
She will escape from the rut of small domestic household cares, which I have heard you so often say eat the soul out of a woman... She will be out in the open and free from the crushing yoke of conventionalities which hem the most of us in like prison walls. ~Robert Grant, "The Fall of the House of Padelford," 1892
There is a great divide in humankind that cannot be bridged — that between those who have an intuitive understanding of how a dishwasher should be loaded for maximum efficiency — and those who do not. Observation and instruction seem to have no effect in remedying the plight of the less fortunate. ~Dr. Idel Dreimer, lumpenbangenpiano.com