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Quotes by Phyllis McGinley

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
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
Getting along with men isn't what's truly important. The vital knowledge is how to get along with a man, one man.
– Phyllis McGinley
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
Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same.
– Phyllis McGinley
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
In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.
– Phyllis McGinley
Marriage was all a woman's idea and for man's acceptance of the pretty yoke, it becomes us to be grateful.
– Phyllis McGinley
Meanness inherits a set of silverware and keeps it in the bank. Economy uses it only on important occasions, for fear of loss. Thrift sets the table with it every night for pure pleasure, but counts the butter spreaders before they are put away.
– Phyllis McGinley
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
Of one thing I am certain, the body is not the measure of healing, peace is the measure.
– Phyllis McGinley
Please to put a nickel, please to put a dime. How petitions trickle in at Christmas time!
– Phyllis McGinley
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
The East is a montage. It is old and it is young, very green in summer, very white in winter, gregarious, withdrawn and at once both sophisticated and provincial.
– Phyllis McGinley
The knowingness of little girls hidden underneath their curls.
– Phyllis McGinley
Those wearing Tolerance for a labelCall other views intolerable.
– Phyllis McGinley
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
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
When I was a fireman I was in a lot of burning buildings. It was a great job, the only job I ever had that compares with the thrill of acting. Before going into a fire, there's the same surge of adrenaline you get just before the camera rolls.
– Phyllis McGinley
Nothing fails like success nothing is so defeated as yesterday's triumphant Cause.
– Phyllis McGinley