Top 93 Phyllis McGinley Quotes

#1. 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

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #21319
#2. It's hard / Keeping up with the avant-garde.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #34623
#3. Marriage was all a woman's idea and for man's acceptance of the pretty yoke, it becomes us to be grateful.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #42593
#4. The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #109946
#5. Kindness is a virtue neither modern nor urban. One almost unlearns it in a city. Towns have their own beatitude; they are not unfriendly; they offer a vast and solacing anonymity or an equally vast and solacing gregariousness. But one needs a neighbor on whom to practice compassion.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #115745
#6. I sing Connecticut, her charms / Of rivers, orchards, blossoming ridges. / I sing her gardens, fences, farms, / Spiders and midges.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #130771
#7. Shunning the upstart shower, / The cold and cursory scrub, / I celebrate the power / That lies within the Tub.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #138111
#8. 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.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #141462
#9. History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art ...

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #142364
#10. Words may sting, but silence is what breaks the heart.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #147268
#11. Praise is warming and desirable. But it is an earned thing. It has to be deserved, like a hug from a child.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #155016
#12. Wherever conversation's flowing, / Why must I feel it falls on me / To keep things going?

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #176554
#13. Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #195241
#14. 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.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #236038
#15. Meek-eyed parents hasten down the ramps To greet their offspring, terrible from camps.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #236784
#16. 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.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #280406
#17. 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.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #286492
#18. Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #287669
#19. Cocktail parties ... are usually not parties at all but mass ceremonials designed to clear up at one great stroke a wealth of obligations ...

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #316181
#20. 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.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #321589
#21. Scratch any father, you find / Someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors, / Believing change is a threat ...

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #336555
#22. 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

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #339773
#23. 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

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #341535
#24. 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

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #343696
#25. Of the small gifts of heaven, / It seems to me a more than equal share / At birth was given / To girls with curly hair.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #381113
#26. In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #383185
#27. Of one thing I am certain, the body is not the measure of healing, peace is the measure.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #384204
#28. 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

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #412383
#29. 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.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #451797
#30. Stir the eggnog, lift the toddy, Happy New Year everybody.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #465623
#31. 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

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #488548
#32. 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.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #501052
#33. The ability to forget a sorrow is childhood's most enchanting feature.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #538569
#34. 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

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #541265
#35. 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.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #554134
#36. It is the leisured, I have noticed, who rebel the most at an interruption of routine.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #579816
#37. The saints differ from us in their exuberance, the excess of our human talents. Moderation is not their secret. It is in the wildness of their dreams, the desperate vitality of their ambitions, that they stand apart from ordinary people of good will.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #603066
#38. 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

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #612434
#39. 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

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #625180
#40. 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

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #633827
#41. Oh, princes thrive on caviar, the poor on whey and curds, / And politicians, I infer, must eat their windy words. / It's crusts that feed the virtuous, it's cake that comforts sinners, / But writers live on bread and praise at Literary Dinners.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #636018
#42. 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.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #653312
#43. If childhood is still a state, it is now chiefly a state of confusion.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #658908
#44. 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.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #744948
#45. Tomorrow will come and today will pass, / But the hearts of the young are brittle as glass.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #785173
#46. 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.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #785239
#47. Ladies with curly hair / Have time to spare.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #811759
#48. 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.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #830735
#49. 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.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #840634
#50. 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

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #851589
#51. 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

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #895503
#52. 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.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #897687
#53. 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

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #946098
#54. There is satisfaction in seeing one's household prosper; in being both bountiful and provident.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #975522
#55. 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.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1002901
#56. Please to put a nickel, please to put a dime. How petitions trickle in at Christmas time!

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1043660
#57. 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

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1051664
#58. 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.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1100627
#59. The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1104546
#60. A hobby a day keeps the doldrums away.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1116244
#61. 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

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1242072
#62. 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.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1254436
#63. 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

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1288771
#64. This is the gist of what I know: Give advice and buy a foe.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1294933
#65. Ah, snug lie those that slumber Beneath Conviction's roof. Their floors are sturdy lumber, Their windows weatherproof. But I sleep cold forever And cold sleep all my kind, For I was born to shiver In the draft from an open mind.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1314782
#66. Nothing fails like success; nothing is so defeated as yesterday's triumphant Cause.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1336536
#67. A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1345588
#68. Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1346641
#69. 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

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1358360
#70. Behind every myth lies a truth; beyond every legend is reality, as radiant (sometimes as chilling) as the story itself.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1373742
#71. Getting along with men isn't what's truly important. The vital knowledge is how to get along with a man, one man.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1386058
#72. 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

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1413776
#73. Those wearing tolerance for a label call other views intolerable.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1421264
#74. The knowingness of little girls, is hidden underneath their curls.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1430961
#75. 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.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1444356
#76. I am he / Who champions total liberty - / Intolerance being, ma'am, a state / No tolerant man can tolerate.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1478586
#77. 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.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1478854
#78. Suffering is as necessary to entertaining as vermouth is to a Martini - a small but vital ingredient.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1480883
#79. Time is the thief you cannot banish.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1490963
#80. Say what you will, making a marriage work is a woman's business.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1493076
#81. What in me is pure conviction is simple prejudice in you.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1498644
#82. Sons do not need you. They are always out of your reach, Walking strange waters.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1508023
#83. These are my daughters, I suppose. But where in the world did the children vanish?

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1521555
#84. Meanness inherits a set of silverware and keeps it in the bank. Economy uses it only on important occasions, for fear of loss. Thrift sets the table with it every night for pure pleasure, but counts the butter spreaders before they are put away.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1534707
#85. O, merry is the Optimist, With the troops of courage leaguing. But a dour trend In any friend Is somehow less fatiguing.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1537198
#86. Seventy is wormwood, Seventy is gall But its better to be seventy, Than not alive at all.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1541750
#87. Happiness puts on as many shapes as discontent, and there is nothing odder than the satisfaction of one's neighbor.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1542962
#88. 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.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1552741
#89. I have read that during the process of canonization the Catholic Church demands proof of joy in the candidate, and although I have not been able to track down chapter and verse I like the suggestion that dourness is not a sacred attribute.

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1616797
#90. 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

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1645126
#91. To be a housewife is a difficult, a wrenching, sometimes an ungrateful job if it is looked on only as a job. Regarded as a profession, it is the noblest as it is the most ancient of the catalogue. Let none persuade us differently or the world is lost indeed.

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Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1690872
#92. Aunts are discreet, a little shy / By instinct. They forbear to pry ...

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1738072
#93. Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley Quotes #1767065

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