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 Copy Share 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 Copy Share Image
The saints differ from us in their exuberance, the excess of our human talents. Moderation is not their secret. It is in the wildness… — Phyllis McGinley Copy Share Image
Tomorrow will come and today will pass, / But the hearts of the young are brittle as glass. — Phyllis McGinley Copy Share Image
Borrow my umbrellas, my clothes, my money, and I will likely not think of them again. But borrow my books and I will be… — Phyllis McGinley Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
God know that a mother need fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of… — Phyllis McGinley Copy Share Image
The trouble with gardening is that it does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession. — Phyllis McGinley Copy Share Image
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… — Phyllis McGinley Copy Share Image
Sisters are always drying their hair. Locked into rooms, alone, they pose at the mirror, shoulders bare, trying this way and that their hair,… — Phyllis McGinley Copy Share 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… — Phyllis McGinley Copy Share Image
Marriage was all a woman's idea and for man's acceptance of the pretty yoke, it becomes us to be grateful. — Phyllis McGinley Copy Share Image
