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Phyllis McGinley Quotes
90 Sourced Quotes
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Sticks and stones are hard on bones.
Aimed with angry art,
Words can sting like anything.
But silence breaks the heart.
Phyllis McGinley
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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.
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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Please to put a nickel,
Please to put a dime.
How petitions trickle
In at Christmas time!
Phyllis McGinley
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Sisters are always drying their hair.
Locked into rooms, alone,
They pose at the mirror, shoulders bare,
Trying this way and that their hair,
or fly importunate down the stair
To answer the telephone.
Phyllis McGinley
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Oh, high is the price of parenthood,
And daughters may cost you double.
You dare not forget, as you thought you could,
That youth is a plague and a trouble.
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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A poet with a poem in mind is like a robin with a worm. Let go the worm (or the idea) for an instant, and both have slithered inevitably away.
Phyllis McGinley
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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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One applauds the industry of professional philanthropy. But it has its dangers. After a while the private heart begins to harden. We fling letters into the wastebasket, are abrupt to telephoned solicitations. Charity withers in the incessant gale.
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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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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The thing to remember about fathers is, they're men. A girl has to keep it in mind: They are dragon seekers, bent on improbable rescues. Scratch any father, you find someone chock - full of qualms and romantic terrors, believing change is a threat - like your first shoes with heels on, like your first bicycle I took such months to get.
Phyllis McGinley
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This is the gist of what I know:
Give advice and buy a foe.
Phyllis McGinley
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Why's the resemblance, moral or mental,
Of children to people so coincidental?
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So who can say — this is just between us —
That children and we are a common genus.
Phyllis McGinley
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Prince, I warn you, under the rose,
Time is the thief you cannot banish.
These are my daughters, I suppose.
But where in the world did the children vanish?
Phyllis McGinley
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Shunning the upstart shower,
The cold and cursory scrub,
I celebrate the power
That lies within the Tub.
Phyllis McGinley
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There is no such thing as a perfect house. (What one thinks of as perfection is merely what other people are living in.)
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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Those wearing Tolerance for a label
Call other views intolerable.
Phyllis McGinley
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The knowingness of little girls
Is hidden underneath their curls.
Phyllis McGinley
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The human animal needs a freedom seldom mentioned, freedom from intrusion. He needs a little privacy quite as much as he wants understanding or vitamins or exercise or praise.
Phyllis McGinley
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Happiness puts on as many shapes as discontent, and there is nothing odder than the satisfactions of one's neighbor.
Phyllis McGinley
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Nothing fails like success; nothing is so defeated as yesterday's triumphant Cause.
Phyllis McGinley
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Quote of the day
We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
Phyllis McGinley
Wikipedia
Born:
March 21, 1905
Died:
February 22, 1978
(aged 72)
Bio:
Phyllis McGinley was a Pulitzer Prize winning American author of children's books and poetry. Her poetry was in the style of light verse, specializing in humor, satiric tone and the positive aspects of suburban life.
Known for:
Saint-watching (1969)
The plain princess (1945)
The Most Wonderful Doll in the World (1950)
The Year Without a Santa Claus (1956)
A pocketful of wry (1940)
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Phyllis McGinley on Wikipedia
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