Phyllis McGinley Quotes

To me, the term 'middle-class' connotes a safe, comfortable, middle-of-the road policy. Above all, our language is 'middle-class' in the middle of our road. To drive it to one side or the other or even off the road, is the noblest task of the future.

Growing up, I lived a moderate lifestyle with my family.

The suburbs are the American dream, right? Living in a nice house, having a good job, a happy family.

Probably because I'm from a middle class family, I have that nature in me that I don't get too excited with big things.

What I want to do is tell stories about normal people in the American suburbs. I don't write the book where it's a conspiracy reaching the prime minister; I don't write the book with the big serial killer who lops off heads. My setting is a very placid pool of suburbia, family life. And within that I can make pretty big splashes.

A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle class unit.

You won't find average Americans on the left or on the right. You'll find them at Kmart.

I've been on my grandfather's boat, Calypso, twice in my life. My mother raised me in a pretty typical middle-class life.

I myself am consummately middle class. We grew up in upper-middle-class suburbs in Oklahoma City, and that's very much the same ethos as what Richard Yates and John Cheever wrote about.

We weren't poor growing up on Long Island, but it wasn't lavish - just a regular middle-class house.

I grew up with the white picket fence. My dad went to work nine to five, and he had a station wagon.

The values that I have are the values I was raised with, from where I'm from, which is a middle-class place. So that informs everything about me, my politics and all that stuff. I mean, politically, I vote against my own self-interest at every election. I actively ask these people to raise my taxes.

My upbringing was very straightforward suburban working class upbringing.

I'm a middle-class former housewife who goes to my daughter's softball games.

I live in the suburbs, the final battleground of the American dream, where people get married and have kids and try to scratch out a happy life for themselves.

I'm a nice middle-class girl in real life, and I'm a mom and a grandma, and I usually play sweet characters.

For a number of years, I've wondered if people like us are the forgotten. We're not the poor, and we're not the rich. We're not the very young or the aged. We're the average American family.

In America, by and large, in the middle of the road you find us, we the people.

For the left, an obsession with the state. For the right, a worship of the market. But as liberals, we place our faith in people. People with power and opportunity in their hands. Our opponents try to divide us with their outdated labels of left and right. But we are not on the left and we are not on the right. We have our own label: Liberal. We are liberals and we own the freehold to the centre ground of British politics. Our politics is the politics of the radical centre. We are governing from the middle, for the middle.

I watched a lot of television as a kid, and the suburbs to me - that was exotic! Like, a mom and dad who lived in the same house and had jobs and cooked breakfast at the same time every morning and did laundry in a washing machine and dryer? That was like, 'Woah! Who are they? How do you get to be like that?'

I'm quite moderate.

I was a victim of the American Dream, the bourgeois, middle-class dream. All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.

'Middle class' used to mean having two children and sending them to high-quality public schools, or even occasionally to private schools. It meant new brown Stride Rite Mary Janes with little purple and silver flowers when the old shoes were pinching the toes.

We were always a middle-class family who took pride in our little set-up.

I try to be prudent with everything and fortunately I have enough to support me in a nice middle-class lifestyle, while I try to do other things.