Every generation reinvents the wheel - and in the process it often adds to rather than subtracts from a woman's burdens.

Kindness and intelligence don't always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.

The best work is a fusion of love and praise.

Every house we have lived in, every building to which our hands have lent their work, belongs to us by virtue of love or of regret.

I love cloisters, which are the architectural equivalent of a theological concept: perfect freedom within set boundaries.

It's the perpetually unfinished quality of housework that makes it oppressive - it never ends, like bad psychoanalysis, or a dream interrupted. It is paradoxically true that it is exactly this daily re-creation of the world that lends housekeeping its nobility and romance.

The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.