Phyllis Quotes

Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.

A smile is a curve that sets everything straight.

A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.

A good book isn't written, it's rewritten.

Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the sidewalk before it stops snowing.

We spend the first 12 months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next 12 months teaching them to sit down and shut up.

Not only is there often a right and wrong, but what goes around does come around, Karma exists, chickens do come home to roost, and as my mother, Phyllis, liked to say, “There is always a day of reckoning.” The good among the great understand that every choice we make adds to the strength or weakness of our spirits—ourselves, or to use an old fashioned word for the same idea, our souls. That is every human’s life work: to construct an identity bit by bit, to walk a path step by step, to live a life that is worthy of something higher, lighter, more fulfilling, and maybe even everlasting.

Money's scarce Times are hard Here's your fucking Xmas card

I want my children to have all the things I couldn’t afford. Then I want to move in with them.

My recipe for dealing with anger and frustration: set the kitchen timer for twenty minutes, cry, rant, and rave, and at the sound of the bell, simmer down and go about business as usual.

Housework won't kill you, but then again, why take the chance?

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.

Women want men, careers, money, children, friends, luxury, comfort, independence, freedom, respect, love, and a three-dollar pantyhose that won't run.

You don't have to be part of a couple to be happy, you know.

To send a letter is a good way to go somewhere without moving anything but your heart.

When you’ve found the right one - when you see him, when you’re with him - you’ll feel like you’re coming home.

The feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy....Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.

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

Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home.

Maybe it's true that life begins at fifty. But everything else starts to wear out, fall out, or spread out.

Mistakes are the usual bridge between inexperience and wisdom.

I've buried a lot of my laundry in the back yard.

Why is life so complicated....?' I asked. 'To keep us from being bored,' he said.

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

Saying hello to something new means saying good-bye to something old and loved.

If you are embarrassed about your sex, it must mean that you feel there is something demeaning or disgusting about being female. You are all wondrously made, girls. Remember that: wondrously made, and you should carry your sex proudly, a badge of honor.

I used to think that when I grew up there wouldn't be so many rules. Back in elementary school there were rules about what entrance you used in the morning, what door you used going home, when you could talk in the library, how many paper towels you could use in the rest room, and how many drinks of water you could get during recess. And there was always somebody watching to make sure. What I'm finding out about growing older is that there are just as many rules about lots of things, but there's nobody watching.

I am completely happy. My sister is here, and because my sister is here I am somehow more me.

Chimes?" Phyllis asked. "Chimes to call a lover? Chimes with the voice of a bird trapped in them? Chimes that play you whatever song you most desire to hear?" "No thanks," said Nick. "We've got MTV.

There's only one good reason to be a writer-we can't help it! We'd all like to be rich, famous and successful, but if those are our goals, we're off on a wrong foot...I just wanted to earn enough money so I could work at home on my writing.

You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist you must learn your craft—then you can add all the genius you like.

Housework can't kill you, but why take a chance.

I had never before been a special fan of that great comedian Phyllis Diller, but she utterly won my heart this week by sending me an envelope that, when opened, contained a torn-off square of brown-bag paper of the kind suitable for latrine duty in an ill-run correctional facility. Duly unfurled, it carried a handwritten salutation reading as follows: Money's scarce Times are hard Here's your f****** Xmas card I could not possibly improve on the sentiment, but I don't think it ought to depend on the current austerities. Isn't Christmas a moral and aesthetic nightmare whether or not the days are prosperous?

If Jesus ever comes back to earth again, I’m thinking, he’ll come as a dog, because there isn’t anything as humble or patient or loving or loyal as the dog I have in my arms right now.

For Phyllis who made me put dragons in

…and I’m thinking how nothing is as simple as you guess-not right or wrong, not Judd Travers, not even me or this dog I got here. But the good part is I saved Shiloh and opened my eyes some. Now that ain’t bad for eleven.

Well, the man who first translated the bible into English was burned at the stake, and they've been at it ever since. Must be all that adultery, murder and incest. But not to worry. It's back on the shelves.

Since no one really knows what or who God is, or whether God is at all, why can't God be hope?

A smile is a curve that sets things right.

There were so many of these moments that could never be captured accurately, even in the camcorder, only in the heart.

You are the spell the universe has cast.

One way to tell if you're really comfortable with a person is if you can be quiet together sometimes and not feel awkward. If you don't feel obligated to say something brilliant or funny or surprising or cool. You can just be together. You can just be.

Most people know intuitively that when you fall in love, the world is full of magic. What they don't know is that when you discover the universe is full of magic, you fall in love with the world.

There are two ways of meeting difficulties: you alter the difficulties, or you alter yourself to meet them.

Alan: "I had terrible stage fright." Sin: "I'm not familiar with the concept of 'stage fright.'" A: "It's pretty awful. You end up having to picture the entire audience in their underwear. Phyllis was in that audience, you know." S: "Why, Alan, I had no idea your tastes ran that way." A: "Phyllis is a very nice lady. And I do not consider her so much aged as matured, like a fine wine. But I still think you owe me an archery lesson.

For most women, being seen, having others pay attention to you, is imagined and experienced as more desirable and more powerful than commanding an army or seizing control of the means of production and reproduction.

I have often thought,” she said, “that women are the only true adults in the world, and men are a species of children. When babies are born, when the sick are struggling for life, when the old die, you will see women about, but rarely men.

Hurt of this magnitude is like menopause,” Phyllis tells me. I’ve just wiped my nose with one of the hats. She takes it from me and hands me a tissue. “Comes in hot flashes. Just when you feel like you can’t take it anymore, it passes for a bit. But it comes back, boy does it.

It's what they say to do when you're depressed, you know. Walk in someone else's shoes for a while, and your own won't feel so tight.

It would seem that something which means poverty, disorder, and violence every single day should be avoided entirely, but the desire to beget children is a natural urge.

The Three Cs, I told myself. When you're not Comfortable with it, it's not a Compliment, it's Creepy.

Just the other day I said to Fang, "Don't you think we've got a storybook romance?" and he said, "Yes, and every page is ripped.

Words may sting, but silence is what breaks the heart.

My nose remembers more than my eyes. The sharp oily smell of eucalyptus combines with afternoon dust from the hockey field. But my heart feels the different then and now.

how one lie leads to another and before you know it, your whole life can be a lie.

If it doesn't sweat, jiggle, or pant, it's not alive.

My idea of exercise is a good brisk sit.

The banal advice of writ in teachers is "write what you know," but the truth is, you don't know a place until you write it. "Write what you want to know" is more like it.

I wanted to make people aware of libraries as an ecosystem that are threatened in the same way as coral reefs. There's a kind of serendipity that occurs in a library that never happens online. Browsing a stack is a unique experience: that feeling of being attracted by a book, by its cover or typography. What makes me melancholy is the thought of books disappearing from libraries.

Real love opens doors to something larger than oneself.

The most popular labor saving device is still money.

Gossip isn't scandal and its not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same

I needed the loss. I needed to lose to win. Like they say, 'If you lose, don't lose the lessons.

We all have our own battles to fight, and sometimes we have to go it alone. I'm stronger than you think, you'd be surprised.

There were times, in the beginning, when I used my journal as a wailing wall, but I learned not to immortalize the darkness. Rereading it was counterproductive. What I needed was a place in which to collect the light.

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 “Tolerance.

It is a joy to be appreciated for the thing you want to be appreciated for. To be appreciated as a woman, and also to be appreciated as a creature with a mind—what more could I have wanted?

Sin has always been an ugly word, but it has been made so in a new sense over the last half-century. It has been made not only ugly but passé. People are no longer sinful, they are only immature or underprivileged or frightened or, more particularly, sick.

As good as' always spells mediocrity. But when a writer's work is in competition with all those thousands of other manuscripts that pour over an editor's desk, he cannot afford to be 'as good as'; he (or she) must be 'better than.

Apparently that dog of hers joined you in the water.” Yes, that’s right, he took his dip with the rest of us. But what’s that got to do with it?” Wilbert Cream dived in and saved him.” He could have got ashore perfectly well under his own steam. In fact, he was already on his way, doing what looked like an Australian crawl.” That wouldn’t occur to a pinhead like Phyllis. To her Wilbert Cream is the man who rescued her dachshund from a watery grave. So she’s going to marry him.” But you don’t marry fellows because they rescue dachshunds.” You do, if you’ve got a mentality like hers.

The world is full of unrequited love,' I said finally. 'You and Patrick having problems?' Dad said, reaching around to get the butter out of the fridge. 'No, I was just wondering what you would say if I was a lesbian.' 'Come again?' said Lester. 'I'm having a hard time following this conversation.

Before I began research for this book I was not consciously aware that women were aggressive in indirect ways, that they gossiped and ostracized each other incessantly, and did not acknowledge their own envious and competitive feelings. I now understand that, in order to survive as a woman, among women, one must speak carefully, cautiously, neutrally, indirectly; one must pay careful attention to what more socially powerful women have to say before one speaks; one must learn how to flatter, manipulate, aree with, and appease them. And, if one is hurt or offended by another woman, one does not say so outright; one expresses it indirectly, by turning others against her. Of course, I refuse to learn these "girlish" lessons.

Ah, snug lie those that slumber beneath conviction's roof. Their floors are sturdy lumber, their windows weatherproof. But I sleep cold forever, and cold sleep all my kind, For I was born to shiver in the draft from an open mind. Born nakedly to shiver in the draft of an open mind.

Children are born with imaginations in mint condition, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Then life corrects for grandiosity.

An enlightened person raises the level of the consciousness of the entire community.

Where there is laughter there is always more health than sickness.

Ideal mental health, like freedom, exists for one person only if it exists for all people.

Women must convert their love for and reliance on strength and skill in others to a love for all manner of strength and skill in themselves

Reading" had always been my lifeline-- an escape to that imaginary world where hurts were fictional and endings happy...

It did not have the makings of a cozy situation for anyone but Mordred, who seems to relish being hated for the love of being hated.

Just that what happens today or next week or next year isn't necessarily the way things are always going to be. As soon as you settle into a routine, life throws you a curveball. Sometimes you hit it, sometimes you don't.

our tragedy begins humid. in a humid classroom. with a humid text book. breaking into us. stealing us from ourselves. one poem. at a time. it begins with shakespeare. the hot wash. the cool acid. of dead white men and women. people. each one a storm. crashing. into our young houses. making us islands. easy isolations. until we are so beleaguered and swollen with a definition of poetry that is white skin and not us. that we tuck our scalding. our soreness. behind ourselves and learn poetry. as trauma. as violence. as erasure. another place we do not exist. another form of exile where we should praise. honor. our own starvation. the little bits of langston. phyllis wheatley. and angelou during black history month. are the crumbs. are the minor boats. that give us slight rest. to be waterdrugged into rejecting the nuances of my own bursting extraordinary self. and to have this be called education. to take my name out of my name. out of where my native poetry lives. in me. and replace it with keats. browning. dickson. wolf. joyce. wilde. wolfe. plath. bronte. hemingway. hughes. byron. frost. cummings. kipling. poe. austen. whitman. blake. longfellow. wordsworth. duffy. twain. emerson. yeats. tennyson. auden. thoreau. chaucer. thomas. raliegh. marlowe. burns. shelley. carroll. elliot… (what is the necessity of a black child being this high off of whiteness.) and so. we are here. brown babies. worshipping. feeding. the glutton that is white literature. even after it dies. (years later. the conclusion: shakespeare is relative. white literature is relative. that we are force fed the meat of an animal that our bodies will not recognize. as inherent nutrition. is not relative. is inert.)

Writing is a deeply spiritual act that can have a profound effect upon the practitioner.

I can feel my heart growing daily, which has its uncomfortable aspects, as if it could fall with the weight of love and break.

We were all so young that there were no lines on our faces to read between.

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.

The idea that women's strong attachments to each other are what make them so vulnerable is horrifying. I count my close friendships with a few girls that I know as one of the best things I have going for me right now. My love for them leaves me open to hurt, but ... all love does, or at least that's the cliche. Perhaps girls and women do come to love each other too quickly, or once they are trapped into appearing as though they love one another, they don't want to back out of it. That is probably true. But a fear of confrontation in relationships is the downside. The ability to love easily is a positive.

The right wing of the Republican party-- which controlled the White House from 1980 to 1992, crucial years in the evolution of motherhood--hated the women's movement and believed all women, with the possible exception of Phyllis Schlafly, should remain in the kitchen on their knees polishing their husband's shoes and golf clubs while teaching their kids that Darwin was a very bad man. Unless the mothers were poor and black--those moms had to get back to work ASAP, because by staying home they were wrecking the country.

For women not to fear rape because we can successfully defend ourselves against it is not anachronistic but revolutionary. For women to be considered as potential warriors (in every sense of the word, including its physical representation) is not anachronistic but revolutionary. If realized, it might imply a radical change in modern life.

That these girls avoid use of physical violence in resolving conflict, does not mean that these conflicts are resolved in meaningful and enduring ways. Girls might smile, give in, give up - and then continue the conflict behind their opponents' backs. Girls might also smile, give in, make fatal compromises, because their need to belong (or not to be excluded) is more important to them than sticking to their principles.

But the kitchen will not come into its own again until it ceases to be a status symbol and becomes again a workshop. It may be pastel. It may be ginghamed as to curtains and shining with copper like a picture in a woman's magazine. But you and I will know it chiefly by its fragrances and its clutter. At the back of the stove will sit a soup kettle, gently bubbling, one into which every day are popped leftover bones and vegetables to make stock for sauces or soup for the family. Carrots and leeks will sprawl on counters, greens in a basket. There will be something sweet-smelling twirling in a bowl and something savory baking in the oven. Cabinet doors will gape ajar and colored surfaces are likely to be littered with salt and pepper and flour and herbs and cheesecloth and pot holders and long-handled forks. It won't be neat. It won't even look efficient. but when you enter it you will feel the pulse of life throbbing from every corner. The heart of the home will have begun once again to beat.

Okay you guys need the dope on the real story of the princess and the frog...So once upon a time a beautiful independent confident princess came upon a frog sitting by a pond. The frog said to the princess 'I was once a handsome prince until an evil Witch put a spell on me.'...So the smart-assed frog said 'If you will just kiss me I will turn back into a prince. And then you'll marry me move into the castle with my mother and you can cook for me and clean my clothes have my children and live happy ever after while I go rescue a damsel in distress'...Later that night the princess laughed as she sat down to dinner. 'I don't think so ' she said and dug hungrily into her plate of frog's legs. And she lived happily ever after.

Recall that in April 2008 candidate Obama—unaware that a blogger was recording his remarks at a private fundraiser for moneyed Bay Area radicals—dismissed religion as a consolation for the “bitter” in Middle America. Contained within this one remark was the seed of secularist bigotry toward the religious that would come to full and odorous flower in his first term.

But how did you know that it was Stacy?” “There wasn’t a green light flashing, that’s for sure,” he said. “Mostly, I felt I’d met a person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. That I didn’t need to look any further.”” “But how can you be sure?” I persisted. “You can’t. There’s not just one person in the world who’s your type. There’s a whole group with the same likes and dislikes. But you want to spend your whole life looking for all of them? You just feel that everything’s right. You’re at peace with yourself.

The chowdry, or burqa -- the Saudi, North African, and Central Asian version of the head, face, and body shroud -- is a sensory deprivation isolation chamber. It is claustrophobic, may lead to anxiety and depression, and reinforces a woman's already low self-esteem. It may also lead to vitamin D deficiency diseases such as osteoporosis and heart disease. Sensory deprivation officially constitutes torture and is practiced as such in the world's prisons.

Reading to younger children has come to be more or less an accepted thing, but reading to older children or to a family group is done less today with all the other attractions taking the time. Reading to a group provides a unity, a cohesion, that is wonderful. It is common bond of interest. It brings up plenty of things for family talk and discussion. A child who has been read to shows results in his speech and wider experience with languages. And definitely, if the reading is of good books, it is the beginning of good taste in literature.

During this week, Ragan has experience a bit of insecurity with me, the result of my being quieter than usual, which he interprets as being a withdrawal from him. “No,” I countered, “it is a withdrawal into myself.” I do not think the same need exists in him. Quiet can be the two of us reading silently. But he prefers that I be nearby. I need regular time without anybody else around in order to feel restored.

More people should visit Antarctica, metaphorically speaking, on their own. That is one of the conclusions I have reached, one of my recommendations: explore something, even if it's just a bookshelf. Make a stab in the dark. Read off the beaten path. Your attention is precious. Be careful of other people trying to direct how you dispense it. Confront your own values. Decide what it is you are looking for an then look for it. Perform connoisseurship. We all need to create our own vocabulary of appreciation, or we are trapped by the vocabulary of others.

All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo Big Nate series by Lincoln Peirce The Black Cauldron (The Chronicles of Prydain) by Lloyd Alexander The Book Thief  by Markus Zusak Brian’s Hunt by Gary Paulsen Brian’s Winter by Gary Paulsen Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis The Call of the Wild by Jack London The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White The Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury The Giver by Lois Lowry Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling Hatchet by Gary Paulsen The High King (The Chronicles of Prydain) by Lloyd Alexander The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien Holes by Louis Sachar The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins I Am LeBron James by Grace Norwich I Am Stephen Curry by Jon Fishman Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell Johnny Tremain by Esther Hoskins Forbes Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson LeBron’s Dream Team: How Five Friends Made History by LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger The Lightning Thief  (Percy Jackson and the Olympians) by Rick Riordan A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle Number the Stars by Lois Lowry The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton The River by Gary Paulsen The Sailor Dog by Margaret Wise Brown Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury Star Wars Expanded Universe novels (written by many authors) Star Wars series (written by many authors) The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann D. Wyss Tales from a Not-So-Graceful Ice Princess (Dork Diaries) by Rachel Renée Russell Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt Under the Blood-Red Sun by Graham Salisbury The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

Religion, whether we like it or not, is intimately tied to the culture in which it exists. One can argue—with only varying degrees of success, though—that private faith can exist independent of its cultural surround. When, however, two or three faith-filled believers come together, a religion—possibly more of a nascent or proto-religion—is formed. Once formed, it can never be separated entirely from its context. Just as surely as one of the functions of religion is to inform, counsel, and temper the society in which it exists, just so surely is every religion informed and colored by its hosting society. Even a religion’s very articulation of itself takes on the cadences, metaphors, and delivery systems of the culture that it is in the business of informing. Thus, when we look at these semi-millennial tsunamis of ours, we as Christians must be mindful of the fact that the religious changes effected during each of them were only one part of what was being effected, and that all the other contemporaneous political, social, intellectual, and economic changes were intimately entwined with the changes in religion and religious thought.