Quote

The saints differ from us in their exuberance, the excess of our human talents. Moderation is not their secret. It is in the wildness of their dreams, the desperate vitality of their ambitions, that they stand apart from ordinary people of good will.

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
Human
Apart
Ambitions
Humans
Ambition
Vitality
Good
Ordinary
Saints
People
Dreams
Moderation
Talent
Talents
Stand
Excess
Exuberance
Secret
Desperate
Wildness
Dream
Saint
Differ

More quotes by Phyllis McGinley

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There is satisfaction in seeing one's household prosper in being both bountiful and provident.
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What in me is pure conviction is simple prejudice in you.
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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.
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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.
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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. Gossip is the tool of the poet, the shop-talk of the scientist, and the consolation of the housewife, wit, tycoon and intellectual. It begins in the nursery and ends when speech is past.
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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.
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Sons do not need you. They are always out of your reach, Walking strange waters.
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To be a housewife is a difficult, a wrenching, sometimes an ungrateful job if it is looked on only as a job. Regarded as a profession, it is the noblest as it is the most ancient of the catalogue. Let none persuade us differently or the world is lost indeed.
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Tomorrow will come and today will pass, / But the hearts of the young are brittle as glass.
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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.
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If childhood is still a state, it is now chiefly a state of confusion.
Phyllis McGinley
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Sometimes I have a notion that what might improve the situation is to have women take over the occupations of government and trade and to give men their freedom.
Phyllis McGinley
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The knowingness of little girls, is hidden underneath their curls.
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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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.
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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.
Phyllis McGinley
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I have read that during the process of canonization the Catholic Church demands proof of joy in the candidate, and although I have not been able to track down chapter and verse I like the suggestion that dourness is not a sacred attribute.
Phyllis McGinley
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Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.
Phyllis McGinley