Best 101 quotes of Phyllis Mcginley on MyQuotes

Phyllis Mcginley

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    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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    Phyllis Mcginley

    A hobby a day keeps the doldrums away.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    Ah, snug lie those that slumber Beneath Conviction's roof. Their floors are sturdy lumber, Their windows weatherproof. But I sleep cold forever And cold sleep all my kind, For I was born to shiver In the draft from an open mind.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    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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    Phyllis Mcginley

    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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    Phyllis Mcginley

    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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    Phyllis Mcginley

    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.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    Aunts are discreet, a little shy / By instinct. They forbear to pry.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    Behind every myth lies a truth; beyond every legend is reality, as radiant (sometimes as chilling) as the story itself.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    Borrow my umbrellas, my clothes, my money, and I will likely not think of them again. But borrow my books and I will be on your track like a bloodhound until they are returned.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    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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    Phyllis Mcginley

    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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    Phyllis Mcginley

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

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    For little boys are rancorous When robbed of any myth, And spiteful and cantankerous To all their kin and kith. But little girls can draw conclusions And profit from their lost illusions.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    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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    Phyllis Mcginley

    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.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    Getting along with men isn't what's truly important. The vital knowledge is how to get along with one man.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    God knows that a mother needs fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul. But because I happen to be a parent of almost fiercely maternal nature, I praise casualness. It seems to me the rarest of virtues. It is useful enough when children are small. It is useful to the point of necessity when they are adolescents.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    God know that a mother need fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    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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    Phyllis Mcginley

    Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    Happiness puts on as many shapes as discontent, and there is nothing odder than the satisfaction of one's neighbor.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    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.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    I am he / Who champions total liberty - / Intolerance being, ma'am, a state / No tolerant man can tolerate.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    I do not know who first invented the myth of sexual equality. But it is a myth willfully fostered and nourished by certain semi-scientists and other fiction writers. And it has done more, I suspect, to unsettle marital happiness than any other false doctrine of this myth-ridden age.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    If childhood is still a state, it is now chiefly a state of confusion.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    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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    Phyllis Mcginley

    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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    Phyllis Mcginley

    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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    Phyllis Mcginley

    In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    In spring when maple buds are red, We turn the clock an hour ahead; Which means, each April that arrives, We lose an hour out of our lives. Who cares? When autumn birds in flocks Fly southward, back we turn the clocks, And so regain a lovely thing That missing hour we lost in spring.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    I sing Connecticut, her charms / Of rivers, orchards, blossoming ridges. / I sing her gardens, fences, farms, / Spiders and midges.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    It is the leisured, I have noticed, who rebel the most at an interruption of routine.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    It's hard / Keeping up with the avant-garde.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    It's this no-nonsense side of women that is pleasant to deal with. They are the real sportsmen.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    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.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    Ladies with curly hair / Have time to spare.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    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.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    Marriage is a lot of things-an alliance, a sacrament, a comedy, or a mistake; but it is definitely not a partnership because that implies equal gain. And every right-thinking woman knows the profit in matrimony is by all odds hers.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    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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    Phyllis Mcginley

    Meanness inherits a set of silverware and keeps it in the bank. Economy uses it only on important occasions, for fear of loss. Thrift sets the table with it every night for pure pleasure, but counts the butter spreaders before they are put away.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    Meek-eyed parents hasten down the ramps To greet their offspring, terrible from camps.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    Men can't be trusted with pruning shears any more than they can be trusted with the grocery money in a delicatessen . . . They are like boys with new pocket knives who will not stop whittling.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    Mere wealth, I am above it, / It is the reputation wide, / The playwright's pomp, the poet's pride / That eagerly I covet.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    Nothing fails like success; nothing is so defeated as yesterday's triumphant Cause.

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    Phyllis Mcginley

    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.