Filing is concerned with the past; anything you actually need to see again has to do with the future.

I yield to no one in my admiration for the office as a social center, but it's no place actually to get any work done.

Any committee that is the slightest use is composed of people who are too busy to want to sit on it for a second longer than they have to.

In my next life I want to be a pessimist. Then other people could spend all their time cheering me up.

When it comes to housework the one thing no book of household management can ever tell you is how to begin. Or maybe I mean why.

It might be marvelous to be a man - then I could stop worrying about what's fair to women and just cheerfully assume I was superior, and that they had all been born to iron my shirts. Better still, I could be an Irish man - then I would have all the privileges of being male without giving up the right to be wayward, temperamental and an appealing minority.

a perfectly managed Christmas correct in every detail is, like basted inside seams and letters answered by return, a sure sign of someone who hasn't enough to do.