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Phyllis McGinley Quotes

1905–1978 United States

Phyllis McGinley (March 21, 1905 – February 22, 1978) was an American author of children's books and poetry. Her poetry was in the style of light verse, specializing in humor, satiric tone and the positive aspects of suburban life.

United States
Authors
Poets

Random Phyllis McGinley quote

14 quotes

Men may be allowed romanticism; women, who can create life in their own bodies, dare not indulge in it.

God knows that a mother needs fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul.

Gossip isn’t scandal and it’s not merely malicious. It’s chatter about the human race by lovers of the same.

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

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.

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?

Compromise? Of course we compromise. But compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy and Spruce Manor the pleasant place it is.

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

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.

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.

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."

Housewives more than any other race deserve well-furnished minds. They have to live in them such a lot of the time. ... We who belong to that profession hold the fate of the world in our hands.

Wifehood, the house, a family; they are woman’s traditional concern and each in its way represents one of the other great three—faith, hope, charity—which St. Paul sets down as the virtues of earth. (For how can one rear a family without faith? Or build a roof without hope? Or remain a proper wife without charity?) They are life’s vital elements and no ordered world can endure without them.

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.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Phyllis McGinley (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.