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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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Phyllis McGinley
Age: 72 †
Born: 1905
Born: March 21
Died: 1978
Died: February 22
Author
Poet
Writer
Ontario
Oregon
Phyllis McGinley
Children
Stones
Adolescence
Ambition
Towers
Understood
Aliens
Strange
Privacy
Live
Stone
Whole
Twenty
Misinterpreted
Feel
Twenties
Tower
Feels
Ten
Alien

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The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.
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I'm a middle-bracket person with a middle-bracket spouse / And we live together gaily in a middle-bracket house. / We've a fair-to-middlin' family we take the middle view / So we're manna sent from heaven to internal revenue.
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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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In a successful marriage, there is no such thing as one's way. There is only the way of both, only the bumpy, dusty, difficult, but always mutual path.
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Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.
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People are no longer sinful, they are only immature or underprivileged or frightened or, more particularly, sick.
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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.
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Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy
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If childhood is still a state, it is now chiefly a state of confusion.
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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.
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Say what you will, making a marriage work is a woman's business.
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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.
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Tomorrow will come and today will pass, / But the hearts of the young are brittle as glass.
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Behind every myth lies a truth beyond every legend is reality, as radiant (sometimes as chilling) as the story itself.
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What in me is pure conviction is simple prejudice in you.
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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.
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The knowingness of little girls, is hidden underneath their curls.
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Time is the thief you cannot banish.
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Aunts are discreet, a little shy / By instinct. They forbear to pry.
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Nothing fails like success nothing is so defeated as yesterday's triumphant Cause.
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