Alice Duer Miller Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child's curiosity and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic difficulties.

Alice Duer Miller
Chivalry, I don't abuse you,
Not at all — the only rub
Is that those who praise you, use you
Very often as a club.

Alice Duer Miller
I am American bred,
I have seen much to hate here—much to forgive,
But in a world where England is finished and dead,
I do not wish to live.

Alice Duer Miller
A child too, can never grasp the fact that the same mother who cooks so well, is so concerned about his cough, and helps so kindly with his homework, in some circumstance has no more feeling than a wall of his hidden inner world

Alice Duer Miller
'Mother, what is a Feminist?'
'A Feminist, my daughter,
Is any woman now who cares
To think about her own affairs
As men don't think she oughter.'

Alice Duer Miller
Silences, as every observer knows, have strange characteristics all their own — passionate silences, and hateful silences, and silences full of friendly, purring content.

Alice Duer Miller
The white cliffs of Dover, I saw rising steeply Out of the sea that once made her [England] secure.

Alice Duer Miller
Good manners are the technique of expressing consideration for the feelings of others.

Alice Duer Miller
I went to a steam laundry,
And asked with smile polite:
'Ladies, why will you work so late?'
They said: 'We think it right
To buy our opera cloaks ourselves,
And so we work at night.'

Alice Duer Miller
Young and in love — how magical the phrase!
How magical the fact! Who has not yearned
Over young lovers when to their amaze
They fall in love and find their love returned.

Alice Duer Miller
Rare indeed is the nature that does not become a little more intense when its own affairs come under discussion.

Alice Duer Miller
With her hands lying palms upward in her lap, she was leaning back with that calm which good breeding brings only to those who believe absolutely in its supremacy.

Alice Duer Miller
Hate is perhaps the most dynamic of all emotions — fear may immobilize, love may stay the hand, but hate urges to action.

Alice Duer Miller
You can listen like a blank wall or like a splendid auditorium where every sound comes back fuller and richer.

Alice Duer Miller
No one has ever explained why it is that parents and guardians consider dull people such safe matrimonial investments for their young charges. Even granting the unsound assumption that dull people are more apt to be content with their own matrimonial fetters, they are certainly more apt to be the cause of discontent in others.

Alice Duer Miller
Men are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions shows this, while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders them particularly unfit for the task of government.... Man's place is the armory.

Alice Duer Miller
It is always difficult for a woman to be grateful for a form of chivalry that seems to be based on the premise that she is a moron.

Alice Duer Miller
They make other nations seem pale and flighty,
But they do think England is God almighty,
And you must remind them now and then
That other countries breed other men.

Alice Duer Miller
It's been my experience, Charlotte, that the crisis never comes as or when you expect.

Alice Duer Miller
Love will not always linger longest
With those who hold it in too clenched a fist.

Alice Duer Miller