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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

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The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.
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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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Wherever conversation's flowing, / Why must I feel it falls on me / To keep things going?
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Those wearing Tolerance for a label call other views intolerable.
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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.
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There is satisfaction in seeing one's household prosper in being both bountiful and provident.
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Of course we women gossip on occasion. But our appetite for it is not as avid as a man s. It is in the boys gyms, the college fraternity houses, the club locker rooms, the paneled offices of business that gossip reaches its luxuriant flower.
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How happy is the Optimist / To whom life shows its sunny side / His horse may lose, his ship may list, / But he always sees the funny side.
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A bookworm in bed with a new novel and a good reading lamp is as much prepared for pleasure as a pretty girl at a college dance.
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Nothing fails like success nothing is so defeated as yesterday's triumphant Cause.
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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.
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Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.
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Of one thing I am certain, the body is not the measure of healing, peace is the measure.
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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.
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People are no longer sinful, they are only immature or underprivileged or frightened or, more particularly, sick.
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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.
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Of the small gifts of heaven, / It seems to me a more than equal share / At birth was given / To girls with curly hair.
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Cocktail parties ... are usually not parties at all but mass ceremonials designed to clear up at one great stroke a wealth of obligations.
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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.
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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.
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