War & Peace Quote by Phyllis McGinley

McGinley’s line quietly torches a culture that wants recovery to be photogenic. “The body” stands in for the scoreboard metrics we’re trained to trust: pain scales, lab numbers, weight, mobility, a before-and-after narrative tidy enough to post. She doesn’t deny the body’s reality; she denies its authority. The pivot word is “measure.” Healing isn’t framed as a process but as an audit, and McGinley is calling out how easily the audit becomes the goal. If you can’t prove improvement in visible increments, the world treats you as suspect: malingering, dramatic, unfinished.

Her alternative standard, “peace,” is deliberately slippery. It can’t be graphed, which is the point. Peace is an interior ceasefire: the moment the self stops negotiating with pain, disability, grief, or a changed life as if it were a temporary inconvenience. That’s the subtext: sometimes the most honest “healing” is acceptance without surrender, a truce that doesn’t require the body to cooperate on schedule.

Context matters. McGinley wrote from mid-century America, a period that prized composure, domestic order, and the performance of normalcy. In that world, “getting better” often meant returning to function and silence. Her sentence keeps the poise but smuggles in a radical redefinition: the endpoint isn’t restoration, it’s reconciliation. It’s a rebuke to anyone who confuses medical outcomes with human outcomes, and a permission slip for people whose bodies may never fully “heal” to still claim a life that feels settled, even sovereign.