Phyllis McGinley Quotes

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation..

Cynicism, I contend, is the wailing of someone who believes that things are, or should be, or could be, much, much better than they are.

When I left the Seekers it was because I was unhappy. I wouldn't have left if I'd been happy.

Oh, cold world -- I have grown so weary of you and all your horrible bathrooms.

Life! Don't talk to me about life!

That should be your town motto. It's all I ever hear. Like: New Hampshire, Live Free or Die. It should be: Despair, You Need To Leave Now.

What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn't starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn't enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand. I felt like I had swallowed yeast, like whatever evil was festering inside me had doubled in size.

What a miserable thing life is: you're living in clover, only the clover isn't good enough.

Now is the winter of our discontent.

I don't know whether I'm misanthropic. It seems to me I'm constantly disappointed. I'm very easily disappointed.

Many people are never happier than when they get the opportunity to complain, while others are deeply unhappy with how things are but just accept the fact. Complaint occurs when we refuse to accept that things are wrong and we do something about it, even if that something is simply articulating our unease.

I do not write often now - not for want of something to say, but from a loathing of all I see and hear. Why dwell upon it?

If I could get my membership fee back, I'd resign from the human race.

People who are the salt of the earth get up and go to a job that they hate.

No matter where you're going it's the wrong place.

Everything is vain and tortures the spirit instead of calming and satisfying it.

It's true, I don't like the real world.

Larry David's armor is his dissatisfaction with the world down to the smallest detail, and up to the whole ghastly arrangement. He won't win, but he'll enjoy losing.

I don't think the world is a particularly pleasant place.

What I do is spend too much time thinking. Most of the time I just walk around annoyed. Would I describe myself as relatively happy, I suppose, but society gets to me. And the people that have mastered life seem to not care, and then they die, and then the grenade goes off.

I guess I'm struck all the time by how outrageously wrong life is. There are times I can't stand to read the newspapers. It makes me insane.

I think by now I have made it fairly clear that I am not very happy with the word hope. I don't believe in people just hoping.

Honestly, I'm so sick of myself.