Phyllis McGinley
Phyllis McGinley
Phyllis McGinleywas a Pulitzer Prizewinning American author of children's books and poetry. Her poetry was in the style of light verse, specializing in humor, satiric tone and the positive aspects of suburban life...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth21 March 1905
CountryUnited States of America
garden doe obsession
The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.
children hug praise
Praise is warming and desirable. But it is an earned thing. It has to be deserved, like a hug from a child.
life spices compromise
Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy
travel rain vacation
Rain is my lover, my apple strudel. / It haunts my heels like a pedigreed poodle. / Beyond the seas or across the nation, / It follows me faithful on every vacation.
children ambition towers
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.
daughter children world
These are my daughters, I suppose. But where in the world did the children vanish?
mom daughter may
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.
track joy catholic
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.
grateful acceptance men
Marriage was all a woman's idea and for man's acceptance of the pretty yoke, it becomes us to be grateful.
spring mean autumn
In spring when maple buds are red, We turn the clock an hour ahead; Which means, each April that arrives, We lose an hour out of our lives. Who cares? When autumn birds in flocks Fly southward, back we turn the clocks, And so regain a lovely thing That missing hour we lost in spring.
children helping-others order
Children are forced to live very rapidly in order to live at all. They are given only a few years in which to learn hundreds of thousands of things about life and the planet and themselves.
kindness compassion practice
Kindness is a virtue neither modern nor urban. One almost unlearns it in a city. Towns have their own beatitude; they are not unfriendly; they offer a vast and solacing anonymity or an equally vast and solacing gregariousness. But one needs a neighbor on whom to practice compassion.
stars men gaza-strip
Sometimes I have a notion that what might improve the situation is to have women take over the occupations of government and trade and to give men their freedom. Let them do what they are best at. While we scrawl interoffice memos and direct national or extranational affairs, men could spend all their time inventing wheels, peering at stars, composing poems, carving statues, exploring continents -- discovering, reforming, or crying out in a sacramental wilderness. Efficiency would probably increase, and no one would have to worry so much about the Gaza Strip or an election.
age done firsts
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.