Phyllis McGinley - Live Quotes

6 Sourced Quotes

View all Phyllis McGinley Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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