Quotes from Phyllis McGinley

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.

Love or perish" we are told and we tell ourselves. The phrase is true enough so long as we do not interpret it as "Mingle or be a failure.

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

A lover would find life less broken apart after a misguided love affair if they could feel that they had been sinful rather than foolish.

Let others, worn with living / And living's aftermath, / Take Sleep to heal the heart's distress, / Take Love to be their comfortress, / Take Song or Food or Fancy Dress, / But I shall take a Bath.

A hobby a day keeps the doldrums away.

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.

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.

Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.

For the wonderful thing about saints is that they were human. They lost their tempers, got angry, scolded God, were egotistical or testy or impatient in their turns, made mistakes and regretted them. Still they went on doggedly blundering toward heaven.

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

To be a housewife is ... a difficult, a wrenching, sometimes ungrateful job if it's looked on as only 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 will be lost indeed.

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

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

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.

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

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.

History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art.

Say what you will, making a marriage work is a woman's business.

O, merry is the Optimist, With the troops of courage leaguing. But a dour trend In any friend Is somehow less fatiguing.

A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.

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.

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

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.