Phyllis McGinley Quotes
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.
Of one thing I am certain, the body is not the measure of healing, peace is the measure.
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.
Seventy is wormwood, Seventy is gall But its better to be seventy, Than not alive at all.
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.
Please to put a nickel, please to put a dime. How petitions trickle in at Christmas time!
The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.
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.
Getting along with men isn't what's truly important. The vital knowledge is how to get along with one man.
Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy
Scratch any father, you find / Someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors, / Believing change is a threat.
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.
Of the small gifts of heaven, / It seems to me a more than equal share / At birth was given / To girls with curly hair.
Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same.
How happy is the Optimist / To whom life shows its sunny side / His horse may lose, his ship may list, / But he always sees the funny side.
Marriage was all a woman's idea and for man's acceptance of the pretty yoke, it becomes us to be grateful.
I sing Connecticut, her charms / Of rivers, orchards, blossoming ridges. / I sing her gardens, fences, farms, / Spiders and midges.
Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense.
People are no longer sinful, they are only immature or underprivileged or frightened or, more particularly, sick.
Nothing fails like success; nothing is so defeated as yesterday's triumphant Cause.
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.
A bookworm in bed with a new novel and a good reading lamp is as much prepared for pleasure as a pretty girl at a college dance.
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.
Praise is warming and desirable. But it is an earned thing. It has to be deserved, like a hug from a child.
Wherever conversation's flowing, / Why must I feel it falls on me / To keep things going?
Rain is my lover, my apple strudel. / It haunts my heels like a pedigreed poodle. / Beyond the seas or across the nation, / It follows me faithful on every vacation.
Women are not men's equals in anything except responsibility. We are not their inferiors, either, or even their superiors. We are quite simply different races.
Behind every myth lies a truth; beyond every legend is reality, as radiant (sometimes as chilling) as the story itself.
Pressed for rules and verities, All i recolelct are these: Feed a cold and starve a fever. Argue with no true believer. Think-too-long is never-act. Scratch a myth and find a fact.
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.
It's this no-nonsense side of women that is pleasant to deal with. They are the real sportsmen.
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.
O, merry is the Optimist, With the troops of courage leaguing. But a dour trend In any friend Is somehow less fatiguing.
Mere wealth, I am above it, / It is the reputation wide, / The playwright's pomp, the poet's pride / That eagerly I covet.
Love or perish" we are told and we tell ourselves. The phrase is true enough so long as we do not interpret it as "Mingle or be a failure.
Ah! some love Paris, / And some Purdue. / But love is an archer with a low I.Q. / A bold, bad bowman, and innocent of pity. / So I'm in love with / New York City.
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.
suffering is as necessary to entertaining as vermouth is to a Martini - a small but vital ingredient.
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.