Phyllis McGinley Quotes

90 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

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

Phyllis McGinley
The little vices bring relaxation; and a bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides that necessary roughage in the literary diet.

Phyllis McGinley
Suffering is as necessary to entertaining as vermouth is to a Martini — a small but vital ingredient.

Phyllis McGinley
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
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
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
Gossip is the tool of the poet, the shoptalk of the scientist, and the consolation of the housewife, wit, tycoon and intellectual. It begins in the nursery and ends when speech is past.

Phyllis McGinley
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
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
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
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.

Phyllis McGinley
Let others deck them as they please
In frill and furbelow.
She scorns alike the fripperies
Of flowers and of snow.

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

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

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

Phyllis McGinley
Women, I contend, 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
We might as well give up the fiction
That we can argue any view.
For what in me is pure Conviction
Is simple Prejudice in you.

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
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 passé. People are no longer sinful, they are only immature or underprivileged or frightened or, more particularly, sick.

Phyllis McGinley