"Those wearing tolerance for a label call other views intolerable." -- Phyllis McGinley
Phyllis McGinley (March 21, 1905 - February 22, 1978) was an American writer of children's books and poet about the positive aspects of suburban life.
McGinley was born in Ontario, Oregon. At age 3, her family moved to Iliff Colorado, and then to Ogden, Utah after her father died.
She studied at the University of Southern California and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, graduating in 1927, then moved to New York City. She wrote copy for an advertising agency, then taught at a junior high school in New Rochelle, New York for one year, until her career as a writer and poet took off.
A poet from the age of six, she published prolifically. Her poems appeared primarily in The New Yorker, where she first published in 1934 or earlier, but she also wrote for such outlets as New York Herald Tribune and was the poetry editor for Town & Country. She also wrote the lyrics for a musical revue, Small Wonder, in 1948, and the script for the Czech animated feature film "The Emperor's Nightingale," in 1951.
In 1955, she was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
In 1961 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; in 1964 she was honored with the Laetare Medal by the University of Notre Dame (described as 'An honor to a man or woman who has "enriched the heritage of humanity"'). She also holds nearly a dozen honorary degrees - "including one from the stronghold of strictly masculine pride, Dartmouth College" (from the dust jacket of Sixpence in Her Shoe (copy 1964)).
She moved to Larchmont, New York in 1937 with her husband, Bill Hayden, and raised two daughters there, singing the praises of domesticity and small town suburbia for nearly 40 years. McGinley died in New York City in 1978.
"A hobby a day keeps the doldrums away.""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.""Getting along with men isn't what's truly important. The vital knowledge is how to get along with a man, one man.""Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same.""In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.""Marriage was all a woman's idea and for man's acceptance of the pretty yoke, it becomes us to be grateful.""Nothing fails like success; nothing is so defeated as yesterday's triumphant Cause.""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!""Praise is warming and desirable. But it is an earned thing. It has to be deserved, like a hug from a child.""Seventy is wormwood, Seventy is gall But its better to be seventy, Than not alive at all.""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.""When blithe to argument I come, Though armed with facts, and merry, May Providence protect me from The fool as adversary, Whose mind to him a kingdom is Where reason lacks dominion, Who calls conviction prejudice And prejudice opinion.""Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart."