Phyllis McGinley > Quotes

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

“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.”
― Phyllis McGinley

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

“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.”
― Phyllis McGinley

“But the kitchen will not come into its own again until it ceases to be a status symbol and becomes again a workshop. It may be pastel. It may be ginghamed as to curtains and shining with copper like a picture in a woman's magazine. But you and I will know it chiefly by its fragrances and its clutter. At the back of the stove will sit a soup kettle, gently bubbling, one into which every day are popped leftover bones and vegetables to make stock for sauces or soup for the family. Carrots and leeks will sprawl on counters, greens in a basket. There will be something sweet-smelling twirling in a bowl and something savory baking in the oven. Cabinet doors will gape ajar and colored surfaces are likely to be littered with salt and pepper and flour and herbs and cheesecloth and pot holders and long-handled forks. It won't be neat. It won't even look efficient. but when you enter it you will feel the pulse of life throbbing from every corner. The heart of the home will have begun once again to beat.”
― Phyllis McGinley

“Words may sting, but silence is what breaks the heart.”
― Phyllis McGinley

“Ah, snug lie those that slumber beneath conviction's roof.
Their floors are sturdy lumber, their windows weatherproof.
But I sleep cold forever, and cold sleep all my kind,
For I was born to shiver in the draft from an open mind.
Born nakedly to shiver in the draft of an open mind.”
― Phyllis McGinley

“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 passé. People are no longer sinful, they are only immature or underprivileged or frightened or, more particularly, sick.”
― Phyllis McGinley

“The other day I chanced to meet
An angry man upon the street —
A man of wrath, a man of war,
A man who truculently bore
Over his shoulder, like a lance,
A banner labeled “Tolerance.”
― Phyllis McGinley

“Gossip isn't scandal and its not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same”
― Phyllis McGinley

“Housewives more than any other race deserve well-furnished minds. They have to live in them such a lot of the time.”
― Phyllis McGinley, Sixpence in Her Shoe

“Wifehood, the house, a family they are woman's traditional concern and each in its way represents one of the other great three- faith, hope, charity - which St. Paul sets down as the virtues of earth. (For how can one rear a family without faith? Or build a roof without hope? Or remain a proper wife without charity?) They are life's most vital elements and no ordered world can endure without them.”
― Phyllis McGinley, Sixpence in Her Shoe