Phyllis McGinley
Of one thing I am certain, the body is not the measure of healing, peace is the measure.Collection: Peace
Please to put a nickel, please to put a dime. How petitions trickle in at Christmas time!Collection: Christmas
Nothing fails like success; nothing is so defeated as yesterday's triumphant Cause.Collection: Success
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.Collection: Intelligence
In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.Collection: Poetry
Marriage was all a woman's idea and for man's acceptance of the pretty yoke, it becomes us to be grateful.Collection: Marriage
A hobby a day keeps the doldrums away.
Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart.
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.
When blithe to argument I come, Though armed with facts, and merry, May Providence protect me from The fool as adversary, Whose mind to him a kingdom is Where reason lacks dominion, Who calls conviction prejudice And prejudice opinion.
Seventy is wormwood, Seventy is gall But its better to be seventy, Than not alive at all.
Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same.
Those wearing tolerance for a label call other views intolerable.
Praise is warming and desirable. But it is an earned thing. It has to be deserved, like a hug from a child.
Getting along with men isn't what's truly important. The vital knowledge is how to get along with a man, one man.
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.
The wonderful thing about saints is that they were human. They lost their tempers, got hungry, scolded God, were egotistical or impatient in their turns, made mistakes and regretted them. Still they went on doggedly blundering toward heaven.Collection: Mistake
God know that a mother need fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul.Collection: Mom
Stir the eggnog, lift the toddy, Happy New Year everybody.Collection: New Year
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.Collection: Sex
Pressed for rules and verities, All i recolelct are these: Feed a cold and starve a fever. Argue with no true believer. Think-too-long is never-act. Scratch a myth and find a fact.Collection: Women
The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.Collection: Garden
The ability to forget a sorrow is childhood's most enchanting feature.Collection: Childhood
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.Collection: Horse
This is the gist of what I know: Give advice and buy a foe.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Mothers Day
The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.Collection: Live Life
Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happyCollection: Life
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.Collection: Marriage
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.Collection: Book
The East is the hearthside of America. Like any home, therefore, it has the defects of its virtues. Because it is a long-lived-inhouse, it bursts its seams, is inconvenient, needs constant refurbishing. And some of the family resources have been spent. To attain the privacy that grown-up people find so desirable, Easterners live a harder life than people elsewhere. Today it is we and not the frontiersman who must be rugged to survive.Collection: Home
A bookworm in bed with a new novel and a good reading lamp is as much prepared for pleasure as a pretty girl at a college dance.Collection: Girl
Say what you will, making marriage work is a woman's business. The institution was invented to do her homage; it was contrived for her protection. Unless she accepts it as such --as a beautiful, bountiful, but quite unequal association --the going will be hard indeed.Collection: Marriage
Wherever conversation's flowing, / Why must I feel it falls on me / To keep things going?Collection: Fall
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.Collection: Children
Of the small gifts of heaven, / It seems to me a more than equal share / At birth was given / To girls with curly hair.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Cake
It's hard / Keeping up with the avant-garde.Collection: Avant Garde
Tomorrow will come and today will pass, / But the hearts of the young are brittle as glass.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Mom
The East is a montage. It is old and it is young, very green in summer, very white in winter, gregarious, withdrawn and at once both sophisticated and provincial.Collection: Summer
The Enemy, who wears her mother's usual face and confidential tone, has access; doubtless stares into her writing case and listens on the phone.Collection: Mother
There are books that one needs maturity to enjoy just as there are books an adult can come on too late to savor.Collection: Book
It's this no-nonsense side of women that is pleasant to deal with. They are the real sportsmen.Collection: Real
Men can't be trusted with pruning shears any more than they can be trusted with the grocery money in a delicatessen . . . They are like boys with new pocket knives who will not stop whittling.Collection: Boys
Women 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.Collection: Responsibility
Sometimes I have a notion that what might improve the situation is to have women take over the occupations of government and trade and to give men their freedom.Collection: Stars
Ladies with curly hair / Have time to spare.Collection: Curly Hair
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.Collection: Heart