Quote

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.

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
Novel
College
Bookworm
Pretty
Bookworms
Pleasure
Lamp
Reading
Lamps
Girl
Bed
Much
Prepared
Good
Dance

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Marriage was all a woman's idea and for man's acceptance of the pretty yoke, it becomes us to be grateful.
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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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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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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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I sing Connecticut, her charms / Of rivers, orchards, blossoming ridges. / I sing her gardens, fences, farms, / Spiders and midges.
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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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Nothing fails like success nothing is so defeated as yesterday's triumphant Cause.
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Pressed for rules and verities, All i recolelct are these: Feed a cold and starve a fever. Argue with no true believer. Think-too-long is never-act. Scratch a myth and find a fact.
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These are my daughters, I suppose. But where in the world did the children vanish?
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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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Praise is warming and desirable. But it is an earned thing. It has to be deserved, like a hug from a child.
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What in me is pure conviction is simple prejudice in you.
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Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.
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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The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.
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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.
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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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Wherever conversation's flowing, / Why must I feel it falls on me / To keep things going?
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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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The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.
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