[H]ousework, if it is done right, can kill you. – John Skow, about the message of Erma Bombeck’s early columns in the 1960s,

This mess is a place! – Author Unknown

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

There was no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse. – Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant, 1968