Phyllis Mcginley quotes

" Whatever you may look like, marry a man your own age -- as your beauty fades, so will his eyesight. " # Age and Aging # Marriage # Beauty

" Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart. " # Silence # Words # Heart

" 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 rescues. Scratch any father, you find someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors, believing change is a threat -- like your first shoes with heels on, like your first bicycle I it took such months to get. " # Fathers # Change # World Affairs

" God knows that a mother needs fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul. But because I happen to be a parent of almost fiercely maternal nature, I praise casualness . It seems to me the rarest of virtues. It is useful enough when children are small. It is important to the point of necessity when they are adolescents. " # Courage # Children # Patience

" The system -- the American one, at least -- is a vast and noble experiment. It has been polestar and exemplar for other nations. But from kindergarten until she graduates from college the girl is treated in it exactly like her brothers. She studies the same subjects, becomes proficient at the same sports. Oh, it is a magnificent lore she learns, education for the mind beyond anything Jane Austen or Saint Theresa or even Mrs. Pankhurst ever dreamed. It is truly Utopian. But Utopia was never meant to exist on this disheveled planet. " # Education # Utopia # America

" 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. " # Family # Age and Aging # Writers and Writing

" 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. " # Frigidity # Freedom # Power

" The knowingness of little girls hidden underneath their curls. " # Girls # Freedom # Power

" 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. " # Gossip # Freedom # Power

" 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. " # Gossip # Freedom # Power