Quote

Scratch any father, you find / Someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors, / Believing change is a threat.

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
Someone
Scratch
Change
Scratches
Find
Believing
Believe
Romantic
Terror
Threat
Chock
Full
Qualms
Father
Terrors

More quotes by Phyllis McGinley

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These are my daughters, I suppose. But where in the world did the children vanish?
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What in me is pure conviction is simple prejudice in you.
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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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There is satisfaction in seeing one's household prosper in being both bountiful and provident.
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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.
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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.
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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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Behind every myth lies a truth beyond every legend is reality, as radiant (sometimes as chilling) as the story itself.
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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.
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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 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.
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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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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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Say what you will, making a marriage work is a woman's business.
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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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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A lady is smarter than a gentleman, maybe, she can sew a fine seam, she can have a baby, she can use her intuition instead of her brain, but she can't fold a paper in a crowded train.
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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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Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.
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The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.
Phyllis McGinley