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The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.
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
Mass
Quiet
Lives
Live
Men
Exasperation
More quotes by Phyllis McGinley
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
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
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.
Phyllis McGinley
Tomorrow will come and today will pass, / But the hearts of the young are brittle as glass.
Phyllis McGinley
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
I sing Connecticut, her charms / Of rivers, orchards, blossoming ridges. / I sing her gardens, fences, farms, / Spiders and midges.
Phyllis McGinley
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
Praise is warming and desirable. But it is an earned thing. It has to be deserved, like a hug from a child.
Phyllis McGinley
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
Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart.
Phyllis McGinley
Of one thing I am certain, the body is not the measure of healing, peace is the measure.
Phyllis McGinley
Sons do not need you. They are always out of your reach, Walking strange waters.
Phyllis McGinley
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
People are no longer sinful, they are only immature or underprivileged or frightened or, more particularly, sick.
Phyllis McGinley
Time is the thief you cannot banish.
Phyllis McGinley
Wherever conversation's flowing, / Why must I feel it falls on me / To keep things going?
Phyllis McGinley
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
Behind every myth lies a truth beyond every legend is reality, as radiant (sometimes as chilling) as the story itself.
Phyllis McGinley
Scratch any father, you find / Someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors, / Believing change is a threat.
Phyllis McGinley
What in me is pure conviction is simple prejudice in you.
Phyllis McGinley