139 Quotes by Phyllis McGinley

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same.

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

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 it took such months to get.

Of the small gifts of heaven, /It seems to me a more than equal share / At birth was given / To girls with curly hair.

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