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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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Phyllis McGinley
Age: 72 †
Born: 1905
Born: March 21
Died: 1978
Died: February 22
Author
Poet
Writer
Ontario
Oregon
Phyllis McGinley
Live
Forced
Children
Thousands
Years
Planet
Things
Planets
Life
Learn
People
Helping
Given
Rapidly
Order
Hundreds
More quotes by Phyllis McGinley
Nothing fails like success nothing is so defeated as yesterday's triumphant Cause.
Phyllis McGinley
Aunts are discreet, a little shy / By instinct. They forbear to pry.
Phyllis McGinley
The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.
Phyllis McGinley
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
The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.
Phyllis McGinley
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.
Phyllis McGinley
Scratch any father, you find / Someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors, / Believing change is a threat.
Phyllis McGinley
Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart.
Phyllis McGinley
Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy
Phyllis McGinley
Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.
Phyllis McGinley
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
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
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
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
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
O, merry is the Optimist, With the troops of courage leaguing. But a dour trend In any friend Is somehow less fatiguing.
Phyllis McGinley
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
Sons do not need you. They are always out of your reach, Walking strange waters.
Phyllis McGinley
Wherever conversation's flowing, / Why must I feel it falls on me / To keep things going?
Phyllis McGinley
I sing Connecticut, her charms / Of rivers, orchards, blossoming ridges. / I sing her gardens, fences, farms, / Spiders and midges.
Phyllis McGinley