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

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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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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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Of the small gifts of heaven, / It seems to me a more than equal share / At birth was given / To girls with curly hair.
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Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense.
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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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A bookworm in bed with a new novel and a good reading lamp is as much prepared for pleasure as a pretty girl at a college dance.
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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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There is satisfaction in seeing one's household prosper in being both bountiful and provident.
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The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.
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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.
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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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Aunts are discreet, a little shy / By instinct. They forbear to pry.
Phyllis McGinley
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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.
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.
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.
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Scratch any father, you find / Someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors, / Believing change is a threat.
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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.
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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.
Phyllis McGinley