Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Phyllis McGinley
Age: 72 †
Born: 1905
Born: March 21
Died: 1978
Died: February 22
Author
Poet
Writer
Ontario
Oregon
Phyllis McGinley
Mom
Longs
Fruit
Plate
Hand
Ripe
Mother
Plates
Hands
Understands
Live
Forgive
Life
Forgiving
Hardest
Relentlessly

More quotes by Phyllis McGinley

Image
Of the small gifts of heaven, / It seems to me a more than equal share / At birth was given / To girls with curly hair.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
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
Image
Say what you will, making a marriage work is a woman's business.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
Tomorrow will come and today will pass, / But the hearts of the young are brittle as glass.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I sing Connecticut, her charms / Of rivers, orchards, blossoming ridges. / I sing her gardens, fences, farms, / Spiders and midges.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Love or perish we are told and we tell ourselves. The phrase is true enough so long as we do not interpret it as Mingle or be a failure.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
I'm a middle-bracket person with a middle-bracket spouse / And we live together gaily in a middle-bracket house. / We've a fair-to-middlin' family we take the middle view / So we're manna sent from heaven to internal revenue.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
Cocktail parties ... are usually not parties at all but mass ceremonials designed to clear up at one great stroke a wealth of obligations.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
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
Image
What in me is pure conviction is simple prejudice in you.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
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
Image
How happy is the Optimist / To whom life shows its sunny side / His horse may lose, his ship may list, / But he always sees the funny side.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
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