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Cocktail parties ... are usually not parties at all but mass ceremonials designed to clear up at one great stroke a wealth of obligations.

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
Clear
Stroke
Party
Strokes
Great
Designed
Parties
Obligation
Mass
Cocktail
Usually
Cocktails
Wealth
Obligations

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Praise is warming and desirable. But it is an earned thing. It has to be deserved, like a hug from a child.
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.
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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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Marriage was all a woman's idea and for man's acceptance of the pretty yoke, it becomes us to be grateful.
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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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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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Kindness is a virtue neither modern nor urban. One almost unlearns it in a city. Towns have their own beatitude they are not unfriendly they offer a vast and solacing anonymity or an equally vast and solacing gregariousness. But one needs a neighbor on whom to practice compassion.
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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Behind every myth lies a truth beyond every legend is reality, as radiant (sometimes as chilling) as the story itself.
Phyllis McGinley
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Let others, worn with living / And living's aftermath, / Take Sleep to heal the heart's distress, / Take Love to be their comfortress, / Take Song or Food or Fancy Dress, / But I shall take a Bath.
Phyllis McGinley
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Tomorrow will come and today will pass, / But the hearts of the young are brittle as glass.
Phyllis McGinley
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Of course we women gossip on occasion. But our appetite for it is not as avid as a man s. It is in the boys gyms, the college fraternity houses, the club locker rooms, the paneled offices of business that gossip reaches its luxuriant flower.
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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Aunts are discreet, a little shy / By instinct. They forbear to pry.
Phyllis McGinley
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If childhood is still a state, it is now chiefly a state of confusion.
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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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.
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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Scratch any father, you find / Someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors, / Believing change is a threat.
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