Phyllis McGinley Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Who could deny that privacy is a jewel? It has always been the mark of privilege, the distinguishing feature of a truly urbane culture. Out of the cave, the tribal teepee, the pueblo, the community fortress, man emerged to build himself a house of his own with a shelter in it for himself and his diversions. Every age has seen it so. The poor might have to huddle together in cities for need's sake, and the frontiersman cling to his neighbors for the sake of protection. But in each civilization, as it advanced, those who could afford it chose the luxury of a withdrawing-place.

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

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.

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.

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

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

A hobby a day keeps the doldrums away.

This is the gist of what I know: Give advice and buy a foe.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

O, merry is the Optimist, With the troops of courage leaguing. But a dour trend In any friend Is somehow less fatiguing.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I sing Connecticut, her charms / Of rivers, orchards, blossoming ridges. / I sing her gardens, fences, farms, / Spiders and midges.

For the hearts of nurses are solid gold, / But their heels are flat and their hands are cold, / And their voices lilt with a lilt that's falser / Than the smile of an exhibition waltzer. / Yes, nurses can cure you, nurses restore you, / But nurses are bound that they do things for you.

Marriage is a lot of things-an alliance, a sacrament, a comedy, or a mistake; but it is definitely not a partnership because that implies equal gain. And every right-thinking woman knows the profit in matrimony is by all odds hers.