Phyllis McGinley Quotes

I am more exempt and more distant than any man in the world.

Sometimes you need to stay in touch but be out of reach.

wisdom is like a bottomless pond. You throw stones in and they sink into darkness and dissolve. Her eyes looking back do not reflect anything. I think this to myself even though I love my daughter. She and I have shared the same body. There is a part of her mind that is a part of mine. But when she was born she sprang from me like a slippery fish, and has been swimming away ever since. All her life, I have watched her as though from another shore.

The truth is, I'd like to be closer to my kids. I'd like to share more with them. But that's not what this time in their lives is about. This is their time to separate, to self-direct, to become independent.

You can grow apart from people very quickly.

… splendid isolation

I came to Washington where I knew I would be farther away from America than I could be on some foreign shore.

I do desire we may be better strangers.

A son is like a lopped off branch. As a falcon he comes when he wills and goes where he lists.

Tell Papa I admire him but from now on I plan to admire him from as far away as I can get.

We probably stagnate our children's emotional growth by not letting them have some separation from us.

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.

Now they were as strangers; nay worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted.

I've tried to be totally present, so that when I'm finished with a piece of work, I'm finished. ... The work, once completed, does not need me. The work I'm working on needs my total concentration. The one that's finished doesn't belong to me anymore. It belongs to itself.

I don't think that the flesh is necessarily treacherous, evil, bad. It is cantankerous, and it is independent. The idea of independence is the key. It really is like colonialism. The colonies suddenly decide that they can and should exist with their own personality and should detach from the control of the mother country. At first the colony is perceived as being treacherous. It's a betrayal. Ultimately, it can be seen as the separation of a partner that could be very valuable as an equal rather than as something you dominate.

How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?

Selfhood begins with a walking away, And love is proved in letting go.

The most true-love words are not the ones that grasp and hold and bind you, twisting you both up together in some black dance. No, they are ones that leave you free to stand alone on your own solid ground, leave him to do the same, a tender space between you.

My kids are not interested in anything I do. And I mean that not in any dis to my children or dis to me. My kids have their own life, they could give a sh*t what I do.

He was slumped in the back, gazing out of the window, as though his parents were two people who had picked him up hitchhiking, connected to him merely by chance and proximity.

We live on top of the created world, I think to myself, not in it.

And I would try and walk far enough away that people would not assume I was with him.

Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

I will come to you, my friend, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an almshouse.

If your family or your people are looking over your shoulder, change your seat or push them away.