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.

Porches are America's lost rooms.

The past can be tamed and controlled.

The real reason women fall in love abroad is not that they are free of domestic inhibitions but that they translate their love of stone and place into love of flesh. ... Is this true?

I don't think I know a single woman who knows what she looks like.

Great unhappiness is incompatible with the belief that it will ever end.

Weather creates character.