Phyllis McGinley Quotes

90 Sourced Quotes

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
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!

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
But compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity.

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

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
The more I see
Of the Pekinee,
The more I am fond of people.

Phyllis McGinley
I've been out where the Blues begin,
Stopping at home with my kith and kin,
Where the handclasp's firm, and the smile is humorous,
And Family Friends are a bit too numerous.

Phyllis McGinley
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.

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

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

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

Phyllis McGinley
Always on Monday morning the press reports God as revealed to His vicars in various guises — Benevolent, stormy, patient, or out of sorts. God knows which God is the God God recognizes.

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

Phyllis McGinley
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
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.

Phyllis McGinley
A successful party is a creative act, and creation is always painful.

Phyllis McGinley
Oh, shun, lad, the life of an author.
It's nothing but worry and waste.
Avoid that utensil,
The laboring pencil,
And pick up the scissors and paste.

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
For the wonderful thing about saints is that they were human. They lost their tempers, got hungry, scolded God, were egotistical or testy or impatient in their turns, made mistakes and regretted them. Still they went on doggedly blundering toward heaven.

Phyllis McGinley
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
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.

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

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

Phyllis McGinley