Phyllis McGinley Quotes

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

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.

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.

Happiness puts on as many shapes as discontent, and there is nothing odder than the satisfaction of one's neighbor.

I am he / Who champions total liberty - / Intolerance being, ma'am, a state / No tolerant man can tolerate.

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

Cocktail parties ... are usually not parties at all but mass ceremonials designed to clear up at one great stroke a wealth of obligations.

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

The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.

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

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

What in me is pure conviction is simple prejudice in you.

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

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

Time is the thief you cannot banish.

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.

Tomorrow will come and today will pass, / But the hearts of the young are brittle as glass.

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 It is old and it is young, very green in summer, very white in winter, gregarious, withdrawn and at once both sophisticated and provincial.

It's hard / Keeping up with the avant-garde.

The Enemy, who wears her mother's usual face and confidential tone, has access; doubtless stares into her writing case and listens on the phone.

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

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

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

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

Nothing fails like success nothing is so defeated as yesterday's triumphant cause.

Compromise if not the spice of life is its solidity.

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

The other day I chanced to meet An angry man upon the street — A man of wrath, a man of war, A man who truculently bore Over his shoulder, like a lance, A banner labeled “Tolerance.