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Happiness puts on as many shapes as discontent, and there is nothing odder than the satisfaction of one's neighbor.

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
Neighbor
Satisfaction
Shapes
Happiness
Nothing
Many
Discontent
Puts

More quotes by Phyllis McGinley

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These are my daughters, I suppose. But where in the world did the children vanish?
Phyllis McGinley
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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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Nothing fails like success nothing is so defeated as yesterday's triumphant Cause.
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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Wherever conversation's flowing, / Why must I feel it falls on me / To keep things going?
Phyllis McGinley
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Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense.
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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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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Cocktail parties ... are usually not parties at all but mass ceremonials designed to clear up at one great stroke a wealth of obligations.
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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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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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
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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.
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
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Sons do not need you. They are always out of your reach, Walking strange waters.
Phyllis McGinley
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The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.
Phyllis McGinley
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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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Ah, snug lie those that slumber Beneath Conviction's roof. Their floors are sturdy lumber, Their windows weatherproof. But I sleep cold forever And cold sleep all my kind, For I was born to shiver In the draft from an open mind.
Phyllis McGinley
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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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A lover would find life less broken apart after a misguided love affair if they could feel that they had been sinful rather than foolish.
Phyllis McGinley