Quote

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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Phyllis McGinley
Age: 72 †
Born: 1905
Born: March 21
Died: 1978
Died: February 22
Author
Poet
Writer
Ontario
Oregon
Phyllis McGinley
City
Vast
Cities
Offer
Gregariousness
Virtue
Neighbor
Beatitude
Modern
Towns
Unfriendly
Almost
Kindness
Unlearn
Practice
Neither
Anonymity
Needs
Offers
Urban
Compassion
Equally

More quotes by 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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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.
Phyllis McGinley
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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.
Phyllis McGinley
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Nothing fails like success nothing is so defeated as yesterday's triumphant Cause.
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
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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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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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Say what you will, making marriage work is a woman's business. The institution was invented to do her homage it was contrived for her protection. Unless she accepts it as such --as a beautiful, bountiful, but quite unequal association --the going will be hard indeed.
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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Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense.
Phyllis McGinley
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Of one thing I am certain, the body is not the measure of healing, peace is the measure.
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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Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy
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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Those wearing Tolerance for a label call other views intolerable.
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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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
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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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Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart.
Phyllis McGinley
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What in me is pure conviction is simple prejudice in you.
Phyllis McGinley