Quote

Praise is warming and desirable. But it is an earned thing. It has to be deserved, like a hug from a child.

Phyllis McGinley

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Phyllis McGinley
Age: 72 †
Born: 1905
Born: March 21
Died: 1978
Died: February 22
Author
Poet
Writer
Ontario
Oregon
Phyllis McGinley
Children
Thing
Deserved
Like
Hug
Earned
Warming
Desirable
Praise
Child

More quotes by Phyllis McGinley

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Children from ten to twenty don't want to be understood. Their whole ambition is to feel strange and alien and misinterpreted so that they can live austerely in some stone tower of adolescence, their privacies unviolated.
Phyllis McGinley
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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 pass?. People are no longer sinful, they are only immature or underprivileged or frightened or, more particularly, sick.
Phyllis McGinley
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O, merry is the Optimist, With the troops of courage leaguing. But a dour trend In any friend Is somehow less fatiguing.
Phyllis McGinley
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Getting along with men isn't what's truly important. The vital knowledge is how to get along with one man.
Phyllis McGinley
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Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same.
Phyllis McGinley
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Mere wealth, I am above it, / It is the reputation wide, / The playwright's pomp, the poet's pride / That eagerly I covet.
Phyllis McGinley
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Kindness is a virtue neither modern nor urban. One almost unlearns it in a city. Towns have their own beatitude they are not unfriendly they offer a vast and solacing anonymity or an equally vast and solacing gregariousness. But one needs a neighbor on whom to practice compassion.
Phyllis McGinley
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Time is the thief you cannot banish.
Phyllis McGinley
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Tomorrow will come and today will pass, / But the hearts of the young are brittle as glass.
Phyllis McGinley
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The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.
Phyllis McGinley
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Scratch any father, you find / Someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors, / Believing change is a threat.
Phyllis McGinley
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Aunts are discreet, a little shy / By instinct. They forbear to pry.
Phyllis McGinley
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In a successful marriage, there is no such thing as one's way. There is only the way of both, only the bumpy, dusty, difficult, but always mutual path.
Phyllis McGinley
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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.
Phyllis McGinley
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Love or perish we are told and we tell ourselves. The phrase is true enough so long as we do not interpret it as Mingle or be a failure.
Phyllis McGinley
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Let others, worn with living / And living's aftermath, / Take Sleep to heal the heart's distress, / Take Love to be their comfortress, / Take Song or Food or Fancy Dress, / But I shall take a Bath.
Phyllis McGinley
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The human animal needs a freedom seldom mentioned, freedom from intrusion. He needs a little privacy as much as he wants understanding or vitamins or exercise or praise.
Phyllis McGinley
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There is satisfaction in seeing one's household prosper in being both bountiful and provident.
Phyllis McGinley
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Say what you will, making a marriage work is a woman's business.
Phyllis McGinley
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Say what you will, making marriage work is a woman's business. The institution was invented to do her homage it was contrived for her protection. Unless she accepts it as such --as a beautiful, bountiful, but quite unequal association --the going will be hard indeed.
Phyllis McGinley