Quote

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.

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
Understanding
Vitamins
Freedom
Mentioned
Littles
Seldom
Little
Privacy
Human
Praise
Humans
Exercise
Needs
Wants
Much
Animal
Intrusion

More quotes by 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.
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The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.
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Those wearing Tolerance for a label call other views intolerable.
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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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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.
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Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart.
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What in me is pure conviction is simple prejudice in you.
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Frigidity is largely nonsense. It is this generation's catchword, one only vaguely understood and constantly misused. Frigid women are few. There is a host of diffident and slow-ripening ones.
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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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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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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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Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same.
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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.
Phyllis McGinley
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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.
Phyllis McGinley
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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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Aunts are discreet, a little shy / By instinct. They forbear to pry.
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The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.
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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Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy
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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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