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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
Many
Discontent
Puts
Neighbor
Satisfaction
Shapes
Happiness
Nothing

More quotes by Phyllis McGinley

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Those wearing Tolerance for a label call other views intolerable.
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.
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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.
Phyllis McGinley
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The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.
Phyllis McGinley
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For the hearts of nurses are solid gold, / But their heels are flat and their hands are cold, / And their voices lilt with a lilt that's falser / Than the smile of an exhibition waltzer. / Yes, nurses can cure you, nurses restore you, / But nurses are bound that they do things for you.
Phyllis McGinley
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There is satisfaction in seeing one's household prosper in being both bountiful and provident.
Phyllis McGinley
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Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.
Phyllis McGinley
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Behind every myth lies a truth beyond every legend is reality, as radiant (sometimes as chilling) as the story itself.
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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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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Say what you will, making a marriage work is a woman's business.
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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Tomorrow will come and today will pass, / But the hearts of the young are brittle as glass.
Phyllis McGinley
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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.
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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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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Aunts are discreet, a little shy / By instinct. They forbear to pry.
Phyllis McGinley
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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.
Phyllis McGinley
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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.
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. 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