Quotes from Phyllis McGinley

Faults shared are as comfortable as bedroom slippers and as easy to slip into.

Getting along with men isn't what's truly important. The vital knowledge is how to get along with a man, one man.

Please to put a nickel, please to put a dime. How petitions trickle in at Christmas time!

Life is the fruit she longs to hand you, Ripe on a plate. And while you live, Relentlessly she understands you.

Marriage was all a woman's idea and for man's acceptance of the pretty yoke, it becomes us to be grateful.

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

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?

These are my daughters, I suppose. But where in the world did the children vanish?

Nothing fails like success nothing is so defeated as yesterday's triumphant Cause.

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

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.

A hobby a day keeps the doldrums away.

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. But because I happen to be a parent of almost fiercely maternal nature, I praise casualness . It seems to me the rarest of virtues. It is useful enough when children are small. It is important to the point of necessity when they are adolescents.

Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same. Gossip is the tool of the poet, the shop-talk of the scientist, and the consolation of the housewife, wit, tycoon and intellectual. It begins in the nursery and ends when speech is past.

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.

Sticks and stones are hard on bones, aimed with angry art, words can sting like anything but silence breaks the heart.

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.

To be a housewife is ... a difficult, a wrenching, sometimes an ungrateful job if it is looked on only as a job. Regarded as a profession, it is the noblest as it is the most ancient of the catalogue. Let none persuade us differently or the world is lost indeed.

Getting along with men isn't what's truly important. The vital knowledge is how to get along with a man, one man.

Praise is warming and desirable. But it is an earned thing. It has to be deserved, like a hug from a child.

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.

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.

The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.

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