Phyllis McGinley Quotes

Of one thing I am certain, the body is not the measure of healing, peace is the measure.

A hobby a day keeps the doldrums away.

Those wearing Tolerance for a label call other views intolerable.

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.

Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart.

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.

Stir the eggnog, lift the toddy, Happy New Year everybody.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

In spring when maple buds are red, We turn the clock an hour ahead; Which means, each April that arrives, We lose an hour out of our lives. Who cares? When autumn birds in flocks Fly southward, back we turn the clocks, And so regain a lovely thing That missing hour we lost in spring.

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.

Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy

The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.

Seventy is wormwood, Seventy is gall But its better to be seventy, Than not alive at all.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wherever conversation's flowing, / Why must I feel it falls on me / To keep things going?