The trouble with gardening is that it does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.
—Phyllis McGinley
Topics: Gardening
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.
—Phyllis McGinley
Topics: Marriage
I do not know who first invented the myth of sexual equality. But it is a myth willfully fostered and nourished by certain semi-scientists and other fiction writers. And it has done more, I suspect, to unsettle marital happiness than any other false doctrine of this myth-ridden age.
—Phyllis McGinley
Topics: Men & Women, Men, Women
Who could deny that privacy is a jewel? It has always been the mark of privilege, the distinguishing feature of a truly urbane culture. Out of the cave, the tribal teepee, the pueblo, the community fortress, man emerged to build himself a house of his own with a shelter in it for himself and his diversions. Every age has seen it so. The poor might have to huddle together in cities for need’s sake, and the frontiersman cling to his neighbors for the sake of protection. But in each civilization, as it advanced, those who could afford it chose the luxury of a withdrawing-place.
—Phyllis McGinley
Sticks and stones are hard on bones.
Aimed with angry art,
Words can sting like anything
But silence breaks the heart.
—Phyllis McGinley
Topics: Silence, Relationships
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.
—Phyllis McGinley
Topics: Parenting, Parents
Of course we women gossip on occasion. But our appetite for it is not as avid as a man s. It is in the boys gyms, the college fraternity houses, the club locker rooms, the paneled offices of business that gossip reaches its luxuriant flower.
—Phyllis McGinley
Topics: Gossip
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 pass? People are no longer sinful, they are only immature or underprivileged or frightened or, more particularly, sick.
—Phyllis McGinley
Topics: Sin
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.
—Phyllis McGinley
Topics: Mothers
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.
—Phyllis McGinley
Topics: Gossip
The knowingness of little girls hidden underneath their curls.
—Phyllis McGinley
Topics: Children, Girls
Frigidity is largely nonsense. It is this generation’s catchword, one only vaguely understood and constantly misused. Frigid women are few. There is a host of diffident and slow-ripening ones.
—Phyllis McGinley
Topics: Sex
Life is the fruit she longs to hand you,
Ripe on a plate.
And while you live,
Relentlessly she understands you.
—Phyllis McGinley
Topics: Mothers
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.
—Phyllis McGinley
Topics: Family
Nothing fails like success; nothing is so defeated as yesterday’s triumphant cause.
—Phyllis McGinley
Topics: Success is not everything
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.
—Phyllis McGinley
Topics: Body, Man, Mankind, Women
Those wearing tolerance for a label call other views intolerable.
—Phyllis McGinley
Topics: Tolerance
Marriage was all a woman’s idea and for man’s acceptance of the pretty yoke, it becomes us to be grateful.
—Phyllis McGinley
Topics: Marriage
Please to put a nickel, please to put a dime. How petitions trickle in at Christmas time!
—Phyllis McGinley
Topics: Holidays, Christmas
Gossip is the tool of the poet, the shoptalk of the scientist and the consolation of the housewife, wit, tycoon and intellectual. It begins in the nursery and ends when speech is past.
—Phyllis McGinley
Topics: Gossip
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.
—Phyllis McGinley
Topics: Babies, Men, Women, Men & Women
The thing to remember about fathers is, they’re men. A girl has to keep it in mind: They are dragon-seekers, bent on improbable rescues. Scratch any father, you find someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors, believing change is a threat—like your first shoes with heels on, like your first bicycle I it took such months to get.
—Phyllis McGinley
Topics: Father, Fathers
Gossip isn’t scandal and it’s not merely malicious. It’s chatter about the human race by lovers of the same.
—Phyllis McGinley
Topics: Gossip
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Louise Erdrich American Author
- Laura Schlessinger American Broadcaster
- Carl Sandburg American Poet, Historian
- Shel Silverstein American Cartoonist, Author
- Theodor Seuss Geisel (‘Dr. Seuss’) American Children’s Books Writer
- Marie Chapian American Christian Writer
- Ursula K. Le Guin Science-fiction writer
- e. e. cummings American Poet, Writer, Painter
- Nikki Giovanni American Poet
- Elizabeth Prentiss American Children’s Books Writer
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