Phyllis McGinley Quotes

90 Sourced Quotes

Sticks and stones are hard on bones.
Aimed with angry art,
Words can sting like anything.
But silence breaks the heart.

Phyllis McGinley
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
Please to put a nickel,
Please to put a dime.
How petitions trickle
In at Christmas time!

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

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

Phyllis McGinley
What things are sure this side of paradise:
Death, taxes, and the counsel of the bore.
Though we outwit the tithe, make death our friend,
Bores we have with us even to the end.

Phyllis McGinley
The knowingness of little girls
Is hidden underneath their curls.

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

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

Phyllis McGinley
A poet with a poem in mind is like a robin with a worm. Let go the worm (or the idea) for an instant, and both have slithered inevitably away.

Phyllis McGinley
Our bodies are shaped to bear children, and our lives are a working out of the processes of creation. All our ambitions and intelligence are beside that great elemental point.

Phyllis McGinley
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
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
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.

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

Phyllis McGinley
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.

Phyllis McGinley
There is no such thing as a perfect house. (What one thinks of as perfection is merely what other people are living in.)

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

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

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

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

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

Phyllis McGinley
Why's the resemblance, moral or mental,
Of children to people so coincidental?
...
So who can say — this is just between us —
That children and we are a common genus.

Phyllis McGinley
Prince, I warn you, under the rose,
Time is the thief you cannot banish.
These are my daughters, I suppose.
But where in the world did the children vanish?

Phyllis McGinley