Phyllis McGinley famous quotes

Of one thing I am certain, the body is not the measure of healing, peace is the measure.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Peace #Healing #Body

Those wearing Tolerance for a label call other views intolerable.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Views #Tolerance #Labels

The wonderful thing about saints is that they were human. They lost their tempers, got hungry, scolded God, were egotistical or impatient in their turns, made mistakes and regretted them. Still they went on doggedly blundering toward heaven.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Mistake #Commitment #Heaven

A hobby a day keeps the doldrums away.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Hobbies #Doldrums

Stir the eggnog, lift the toddy, Happy New Year everybody.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#New Year #Happy New Year #Years

Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Broken Heart #Heart #Silence

The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Garden #Doe #Obsession

The knowingness of little girls, is hidden underneath their curls.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Girl #Mom #Daughter

In a successful marriage, there is no such thing as one's way. There is only the way of both, only the bumpy, dusty, difficult, but always mutual path.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Marriage #Successful #Way

A mother's hardest to forgive. Life is the fruit she longs to hand you Ripe on a plate. And while you live, Relentlessly she understands you.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Mom #Mother #Hands

Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Life #Spices #Compromise

When blithe to argument I come, Though armed with facts, and merry, May Providence protect me from The fool as adversary, Whose mind to him a kingdom is Where reason lacks dominion, Who calls conviction prejudice And prejudice opinion.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Mind #Atheism #Prejudice

Praise is warming and desirable. But it is an earned thing. It has to be deserved, like a hug from a child.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Children #Hug #Praise

Let others, worn with living / And living's aftermath, / Take Sleep to heal the heart's distress, / Take Love to be their comfortress, / Take Song or Food or Fancy Dress, / But I shall take a Bath.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Song #Heart #Sleep

What in me is pure conviction is simple prejudice in you.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Simple #Prejudice #Conviction

Aunts are discreet, a little shy / By instinct. They forbear to pry ...
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Aunt #Shy #Littles

Children from ten to twenty don't want to be understood. Their whole ambition is to feel strange and alien and misinterpreted so that they can live austerely in some stone tower of adolescence, their privacies unviolated.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Children #Ambition #Towers

It's this no-nonsense side of women that is pleasant to deal with. They are the real sportsmen.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Real #Sides #Nonsense

Children are forced to live very rapidly in order to live at all. They are given only a few years in which to learn hundreds of thousands of things about life and the planet and themselves.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Children #Helping Others #Order

It is the leisured, I have noticed, who rebel the most at an interruption of routine.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Routine #Rebel #Interruptions

Say what you will, making marriage work is a woman's business. The institution was invented to do her homage; it was contrived for her protection. Unless she accepts it as such --as a beautiful, bountiful, but quite unequal association --the going will be hard indeed.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Marriage #Beautiful #Association

Sons do not need you. They are always out of your reach, Walking strange waters.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Son #Water #Needs

A lady is smarter than a gentleman, maybe, she can sew a fine seam, she can have a baby, she can use her intuition instead of her brain, but she can't fold a paper in a crowded train.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Baby #Brain #Intuition

Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Race #Gossip #Scandal

Seventy is wormwood, Seventy is gall But its better to be seventy, Than not alive at all.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Alive #Wormwood

Women like other women fine. The more feminine she is, the more comfortable a woman feels with her own sex. It is only the occasional and therefore noticeable adventuress who refuses to make friends with us.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Sex #Women #Feminine

Frigidity is largely nonsense. It is this generation's catchword, one only vaguely understood and constantly misused. Frigid women are few. There is a host of diffident and slow-ripening ones.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Sex #Generations #This Generation

I do not know who first invented the myth of sexual equality. But it is a myth willfully fostered and nourished by certain semi-scientists and other fiction writers. And it has done more, I suspect, to unsettle marital happiness than any other false doctrine of this myth-ridden age.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Age #Done #Firsts

Sometimes I have a notion that what might improve the situation is to have women take over the occupations of government and trade and to give men their freedom. Let them do what they are best at. While we scrawl interoffice memos and direct national or extranational affairs, men could spend all their time inventing wheels, peering at stars, composing poems, carving statues, exploring continents -- discovering, reforming, or crying out in a sacramental wilderness. Efficiency would probably increase, and no one would have to worry so much about the Gaza Strip or an election.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Stars #Men #Giving

Women are the fulfilled sex. Through our children we are able to produce our own immortality, so we lack that divine restlessness which sends men charging off in pursuit of fortune or fame or an imagined Utopia. That is why we number so few geniuses among us. The wholesome oyster wears no pearl, the healthy whale no ambergris, and as long as we can keep on adding to the race, we harbor a sort of health within ourselves.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Sex #Children #Women

Shunning the upstart shower, / The cold and cursory scrub, / I celebrate the power / That lies within the Tub.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Lying #Tubs #Baths

Borrow my umbrellas, my clothes, my money, and I will likely not think of them again. But borrow my books and I will be on your track like a bloodhound until they are returned.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Book #Thinking #Clothes

The system - the American one, at least - is a vast and noble experiment. It has been polestar and exemplar for other nations. But from kindergarten until she graduates from college the girl is treated in it exactly like her brothers. She studies the same subjects, becomes proficient at the same sports. Oh, it is a magnificent lore she learns, education for the mind beyond anything Jane Austen or Saint Theresa or even Mrs. Pankhurst ever dreamed. It is truly Utopian. But Utopia was never meant to exist on this disheveled planet.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Girl #Education #Sports

The East is the hearthside of America. Like any home, therefore, it has the defects of its virtues. Because it is a long-lived-inhouse, it bursts its seams, is inconvenient, needs constant refurbishing. And some of the family resources have been spent. To attain the privacy that grown-up people find so desirable, Easterners live a harder life than people elsewhere. Today it is we and not the frontiersman who must be rugged to survive.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Heart #Home #America

I'm a middle-bracket person with a middle-bracket spouse / And we live together gaily in a middle-bracket house. / We've a fair-to-middlin' family; we take the middle view; / So we're manna sent from heaven to internal revenue.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Views #House #Heaven

There is satisfaction in seeing one's household prosper; in being both bountiful and provident.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Satisfaction #Household #Housework

suffering is as necessary to entertaining as vermouth is to a Martini - a small but vital ingredient.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Suffering #Ingredients #Hospitality

History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art ...
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Art #Taken #History

Of the small gifts of heaven, / It seems to me a more than equal share / At birth was given / To girls with curly hair.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Girl #Hair #Heaven

Ladies with curly hair / Have time to spare.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Curly Hair #Hair

The successful truck gardener can never go out to dinner in the summer or spend a week end away, because his conscience tells him he has to be at home eating up his corn or packaging his beans for the freezer.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Summer #Home #Successful

Relations are errors that Nature makes. / Your spouse you can put on the shelf. / But your friends, dear friends, are the quaint mistakes / You always commit yourself.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Friends #Mistake #Errors

Scratch any father, you find / Someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors, / Believing change is a threat ...
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Father #Believe #Scratches

Mere wealth, I am above it, / It is the reputation wide, / The playwright's pomp, the poet's pride / That eagerly I covet.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Pride #Reputation #Wealth

Wherever conversation's flowing, / Why must I feel it falls on me / To keep things going?
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Fall #Conversation #Feels

If childhood is still a state, it is now chiefly a state of confusion.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Confusion #Childhood #States

The ability to forget a sorrow is childhood's most enchanting feature.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Childhood #Sorrow #Forget

One applauds the industry of professional philanthropy. But it has its dangers. After a while the private heart begins to harden. We fling letters into the wastebasket, are abrupt to telephoned solicitations. Charity withers in the incessant gale.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Heart #Charity #Letters

There are books that one needs maturity to enjoy just as there are books an adult can come on too late to savor.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Book #Maturity #Needs

For little boys are rancorous When robbed of any myth, And spiteful and cantankerous To all their kin and kith. But little girls can draw conclusions And profit from their lost illusions.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Girl #Children #Boys

The human animal needs a freedom seldom mentioned, freedom from intrusion. He needs a little privacy as much as he wants understanding or vitamins or exercise or praise.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Exercise #Animal #Understanding

Oh, high is the price of parenthood, and daughters may cost you double. You dare not forget, as you thought you could, that youth is a plague and a trouble.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Mom #Daughter #May

These are my daughters, I suppose. But where in the world did the children vanish?
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Daughter #Children #My Daughter

The East is a montage. It is old and it is young, very green in summer, very white in winter, gregarious, withdrawn and at once both sophisticated and provincial.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Summer #Winter #White

Getting along with men isn't what's truly important. The vital knowledge is how to get along with one man.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Women #Memorable #Important

A lover would find life less broken apart after a misguided love affair if they could feel that they had been sinful rather than foolish.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Broken #Lovers #Ethics

God knows that a mother needs fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul. But because I happen to be a parent of almost fiercely maternal nature, I praise casualness. It seems to me the rarest of virtues. It is useful enough when children are small. It is useful to the point of necessity when they are adolescents.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Mother #Children #Women

Time is the thief you cannot banish.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Thieves #Aging

Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Garden #Goal #Creation

Sin has always been an ugly word, but it has been made so in a new sense over the last half-century. It has been made not only ugly but pass?. People are no longer sinful, they are only immature or underprivileged or frightened or, more particularly, sick.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Sick #People #Immature

Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same. Gossip is the tool of the poet, the shop-talk of the scientist, and the consolation of the housewife, wit, tycoon and intellectual. It begins in the nursery and ends when speech is past.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Past #Race #Gossip

Of course we women gossip on occasion. But our appetite for it is not as avid as a man s. It is in the boys gyms, the college fraternity houses, the club locker rooms, the paneled offices of business that gossip reaches its luxuriant flower.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Flower #Boys #College

In spring when maple buds are red, We turn the clock an hour ahead; Which means, each April that arrives, We lose an hour out of our lives. Who cares? When autumn birds in flocks Fly southward, back we turn the clocks, And so regain a lovely thing That missing hour we lost in spring.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Spring #Mean #Autumn

Marriage was all a woman's idea and for man's acceptance of the pretty yoke, it becomes us to be grateful.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Grateful #Acceptance #Men

The thing to remember about fathers is, they're men. A girl has to keep it in mind: They are dragon seekers, bent on improbable rescues. Scratch any father, you find someone chock - full of qualms and romantic terrors, believing change is a threat - like your first shoes with heels on, like your first bicycle I took such months to get.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Girl #Daughter #Father

A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Now And Then #Trash #Reader

God know that a mother need fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Mother #Brave #Soul

Sisters are always drying their hair. Locked into rooms, alone, they pose at the mirror, shoulders bare, trying this way and that their hair, or fly importunate down the stair to answer the telephone.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Mirrors #Hair #Trying

Meek-eyed parents hasten down the ramps To greet their offspring, terrible from camps.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Parent #Ramp #Terrible

Men can't be trusted with pruning shears any more than they can be trusted with the grocery money in a delicatessen . . . They are like boys with new pocket knives who will not stop whittling.
-- Phyllis McGinley

#Boys #Men #Knives