Top 60 Phyllis McGinley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A hobby a day keeps the doldrums away.”

— Phyllis McGinley

2. “Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart.”

— Phyllis McGinley

3. “In a successful marriage, there is no such thing as one’s way. There is only the way of both, only the bumpy, dusty, difficult, but always mutual path.”

— Phyllis McGinley

4. “Stir the eggnog, lift the toddy, Happy New Year everybody.”

— Phyllis McGinley

5. “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.”

— Phyllis McGinley

6. “Words may sting, but silence is what breaks the heart.”

— Phyllis McGinley

7. “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.”

— Phyllis McGinley

8. “The human animal needs a freedom seldom mentioned, freedom from intrusion. He needs a little privacy as much as he wants understanding or vitamins or exercise or praise.”

— Phyllis McGinley

9. “The saints differ from us in their exuberance, the excess of our human talents. Moderation is not their secret. It is in the wildness of their dreams, the desperate vitality of their ambitions, that they stand apart from ordinary people of good will.”

— Phyllis McGinley

10. “Time is the thief you cannot banish.”

— Phyllis McGinley

11. “A bookworm in bed with a new novel and a good reading lamp is as much prepared for pleasure as a pretty girl at a college dance.”

— Phyllis McGinley

12. “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

13. “What in me is pure conviction is simple prejudice in you.”

— Phyllis McGinley

14. “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

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

— Phyllis McGinley

Featured in: Self Control Quotes

16. “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.”

— Phyllis McGinley

17. “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

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

— Phyllis McGinley

19. “I have read that during the process of canonization the Catholic Church demands proof of joy in the candidate, and although I have not been able to track down chapter and verse I like the suggestion that dourness is not a sacred attribute.”

— Phyllis McGinley

20. “The knowingness of little girls, is hidden underneath their curls.”

— Phyllis McGinley

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

— Phyllis McGinley

22. “When blithe to argument I come, Though armed with facts, and merry, May Providence protect me from The fool as adversary, Whose mind to him a kingdom is Where reason lacks dominion, Who calls conviction prejudice And prejudice opinion.”

— Phyllis McGinley

23. “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.”

— Phyllis McGinley

24. “Those wearing Tolerance for a label call other views intolerable.”

— Phyllis McGinley

25. “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

26. “It’s this no-nonsense side of women that is pleasant to deal with. They are the real sportsmen.”

— Phyllis McGinley

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

— Phyllis McGinley

28. “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.”

— Phyllis McGinley

29. “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

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

— Phyllis McGinley

31. “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

32. “People are no longer sinful, they are only immature or underprivileged or frightened or, more particularly, sick.”

— Phyllis McGinley

33. “There are books that one needs maturity to enjoy just as there are books an adult can come on too late to savor.”

— Phyllis McGinley

34. “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.”

— Phyllis McGinley

35. “Borrow my umbrellas, my clothes, my money, and I will likely not think of them again. But borrow my books and I will be on your track like a bloodhound until they are returned.”

— Phyllis McGinley

36. “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

37. “Of one thing I am certain, the body is not the measure of healing, peace is the measure.”

— Phyllis McGinley

38. “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

39. “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

40. “The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.”

— Phyllis McGinley

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

— Phyllis McGinley

42. “The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.”

— Phyllis McGinley

43. “Marriage is a lot of things-an alliance, a sacrament, a comedy, or a mistake; but it is definitely not a partnership because that implies equal gain. And every right-thinking woman knows the profit in matrimony is by all odds hers.”

— Phyllis McGinley

44. “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

45. “The successful truck gardener can never go out to dinner in the summer or spend a week end away, because his conscience tells him he has to be at home eating up his corn or packaging his beans for the freezer.”

— Phyllis McGinley

46. “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.”

— Phyllis McGinley

47. “Sons do not need you. They are always out of your reach, Walking strange waters.”

— Phyllis McGinley

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

— Phyllis McGinley

49. “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

50. “If childhood is still a state, it is now chiefly a state of confusion.”

— Phyllis McGinley