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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
People
Helping
Given
Rapidly
Order
Hundreds
Live
Forced
Children
Thousands
Years
Planet
Things
Planets
Life
Learn

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.
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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Scratch any father, you find / Someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors, / Believing change is a threat.
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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Aunts are discreet, a little shy / By instinct. They forbear to pry.
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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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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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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Happiness puts on as many shapes as discontent, and there is nothing odder than the satisfaction of one's neighbor.
Phyllis McGinley
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Time is the thief you cannot banish.
Phyllis McGinley
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I have read that during the process of canonization the Catholic Church demands proof of joy in the candidate, and although I have not been able to track down chapter and verse I like the suggestion that dourness is not a sacred attribute.
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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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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Sons do not need you. They are always out of your reach, Walking strange waters.
Phyllis McGinley
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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