Quote

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

Phyllis McGinley

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Phyllis McGinley
Age: 72 †
Born: 1905
Born: March 21
Died: 1978
Died: February 22
Author
Poet
Writer
Ontario
Oregon
Phyllis McGinley
Humans
Chatter
Malicious
Scandal
Gossip
Lovers
Merely
Race
Human

More quotes by Phyllis McGinley

Image
Time is the thief you cannot banish.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
Aunts are discreet, a little shy / By instinct. They forbear to pry.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
Say what you will, making a marriage work is a woman's business.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
Ah! some love Paris, / And some Purdue. / But love is an archer with a low I.Q. / A bold, bad bowman, and innocent of pity. / So I'm in love with / New York City.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
O, merry is the Optimist, With the troops of courage leaguing. But a dour trend In any friend Is somehow less fatiguing.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
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.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
Of the small gifts of heaven, / It seems to me a more than equal share / At birth was given / To girls with curly hair.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
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
Image
These are my daughters, I suppose. But where in the world did the children vanish?
Phyllis McGinley
Image
Praise is warming and desirable. But it is an earned thing. It has to be deserved, like a hug from a child.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
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
Image
Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
Frigidity is largely nonsense. It is this generation's catchword, one only vaguely understood and constantly misused. Frigid women are few. There is a host of diffident and slow-ripening ones.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I'm a middle-bracket person with a middle-bracket spouse / And we live together gaily in a middle-bracket house. / We've a fair-to-middlin' family we take the middle view / So we're manna sent from heaven to internal revenue.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
Those wearing Tolerance for a label call other views intolerable.
Phyllis McGinley
Image
Scratch any father, you find / Someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors, / Believing change is a threat.
Phyllis McGinley