Phyllis McGinley Quotes

Normality is death.

Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.

I don't want to be the guy who sits on a front porch with a mint julep in his hand and rocks his life away.

It's uncomfortable to challenge the status quo.

Everything becomes too normal after a while.

A normal day in my life - well right now it's kinda just like hang out and be lazy .I'm just kinda like enjoying my break, basic, what everybody does. Hang out in my pajamas and eat cereal and watch cartoons.

A rebel is a nonconformist who is constantly saying no, and I'm not that. I'm a conformist and I believe in progress, and you can't make much progress by saying no all the time. A rebel is destructive. I know I have something constructive to offer.

Its matter was not new to me, but was presented in a new aspect. It shook me in my habit - the habit of nine-tenths of the world - of believing that all was right about me, because I was used to it.

Ninety-eight percent are boxes, which tells me that a lot of people are in denial. We live and work in boxes. People don't even notice that. Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable. People say, "This is the world the way it is, and don't bother me." Then when somebody does something different, real architecture, the push-back is amazing. People resist it. At first it's new and scary.

I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security - out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction.

I was perfectly happy in my boring life before you came along.

When a man's busy, why leisure Strikes him as wonderful pleasure: 'Faith, and at leisure once is he? Straightway he wants to be busy.

The other producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. Luckily the inconsequent life is not the only alternative; for caprice is as ruinous as routine. Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become.

We have conferred a mystic popularity upon officials whose only virtue is their timidity; while our scorn of rebels and reformers is so great that we have ceased to persecute them. The capitals and governments of the world are in the hands of caution; and change comes over them only in the night, unseen.

We bore ourselves in order to earn money that we'll later spend on trying to de-bore ourselves

I wouldn't have turned out the way I was if I didn't have all those old-fashioned values to rebel against.

Tradition is laziness.

My days had a pleasant identicalness about them. I had always liked that: I liked routine. I liked being bored. I didn’t want to but I did.

Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.

The most exciting thing either of us does is nap.

Idleness, ennui, noise, mischief, riot, and a nameless train of mistaken notions of pleasure, are often classed, in a young man's mind, under the general head of liberty.

I suppose the most important thing is to stay interested. It's very easy in life if you get to a place where you're successful to hit the same groove on the record player over and over again because it's safe.