Phyllis McGinley

Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy

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.

Of one thing I am certain, the body is not the measure of healing, peace is the measure.

Please to put a nickel, please to put a dime. How petitions trickle in at Christmas time!

Nothing fails like success nothing is so defeated as yesterday's triumphant cause.

It's this no-nonsense side of women that is pleasant to deal with. They are the real sportsmen.

This is the gist of what I know: Give advice and buy a foe.

To be a housewife is ... a difficult a wrenching sometimes ungrateful job if it's looked on as only 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 will be lost indeed.

For the wonderful thing about saints is that they were human. They lost their tempers got angry scolded God were egotistical or testy or impatient in their turns made mistakes and regretted them. Still they went on doggedly blundering toward heaven.

Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.

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.

Compromise if not the spice of life is its solidity.

The wonderful thing about saints is that they were human. They lost their tempers got hungry scolded God were egotistical or impatient in their turns made mistakes and regretted them. Still they went on doggedly blundering toward heaven.

God know that a mother need fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul.

A mother's hardest to forgive.Life is the fruit she longs to hand youRipe on a plate. And while you live,Relentlessly she understands you.

The other day I chanced to meet An angry man upon the street _ A man of wrath, a man of war, A man who truculently bore Over his shoulder, like a lance, A banner labeled __olerance.