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

More quotes by Phyllis McGinley

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Scratch any father, you find / Someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors, / Believing change is a threat.
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.
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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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Say what you will, making a marriage work is a woman's business.
Phyllis McGinley
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Aunts are discreet, a little shy / By instinct. They forbear to pry.
Phyllis McGinley
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If childhood is still a state, it is now chiefly a state of confusion.
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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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
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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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Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense.
Phyllis McGinley
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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.
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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Sometimes I have a notion that what might improve the situation is to have women take over the occupations of government and trade and to give men their freedom.
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.
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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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 trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.
Phyllis McGinley
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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.
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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Marriage was all a woman's idea and for man's acceptance of the pretty yoke, it becomes us to be grateful.
Phyllis McGinley