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Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.

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
National
Poetry
Amount
Reading
Pastime
Amounts

More quotes by Phyllis McGinley

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Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart.
Phyllis McGinley
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The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.
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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Sons do not need you. They are always out of your reach, Walking strange waters.
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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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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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.
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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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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Mere wealth, I am above it, / It is the reputation wide, / The playwright's pomp, the poet's pride / That eagerly I covet.
Phyllis McGinley
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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.
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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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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These are my daughters, I suppose. But where in the world did the children vanish?
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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Wherever conversation's flowing, / Why must I feel it falls on me / To keep things going?
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
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Aunts are discreet, a little shy / By instinct. They forbear to pry.
Phyllis McGinley
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Ah! some love Paris, / And some Purdue. / But love is an archer with a low I.Q. / A bold, bad bowman, and innocent of pity. / So I'm in love with / New York City.
Phyllis McGinley
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What in me is pure conviction is simple prejudice in you.
Phyllis McGinley