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

More quotes by 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.
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Nothing fails like success nothing is so defeated as yesterday's triumphant Cause.
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The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.
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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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Say what you will, making a marriage work is a woman's business.
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Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart.
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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.
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Wherever conversation's flowing, / Why must I feel it falls on me / To keep things going?
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The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.
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.
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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.
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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