Mignon McLaughlin Quotes

Nobody ever loved anybody like everybody wants to be loved.

Neurotics think of the past with resentment, and the future with dread; the present just doesn't exist.

When first we fall in love, we feel that we know all there is to know about life, and perhaps we are right.

We choose those we like; with those we love, we have no say in the matter.

We semaphore from ship to ship, but they're sinking, too.

If you must reread old love letters, better pick a room without mirrors.

Suburb: a place that isn't city, isn't country, and isn't tolerable.

Love requires a willingness to die; marriage, a willingness to live.

Neurotics are sure that no one understands them, and they wouldn't have it any other way.

A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.

If there is something you must do and you cannot do it, you cannot do anything else.

We waste a lot of time running after people we could have caught by just standing still.

Courage doesn't know what's around the corner, but goes around it anyway.

No woman wants to see herself too clearly.

People will disapprove of you if you're unhappy, or if you're happy in The Wrong Way.

The know-nothings are, unfortunately, seldom the do-nothings.

If you see in your children most of your own faults, you have failed as a parent, but succeeded as a neurotic.

It's hard to feel middle-aged, because how can you tell how long you are going to live?

There's an awful lot of blood around that water is thicker than.

We wake in the night, to stereophonic silence.

What we love about love is the fever, which marriage puts to bed and cures.

Hate leaves ugly scars, love leaves beautiful ones.

The marriage of convenience has this to recommend it: we are better judges of convenience than we are of love.

Luck: when your burst of energy doesn't run afoul of someone else's.

Neurotics expect you to remember all the things that they tell you, and many that they don't.

The two main hazards of psychoanalysis: that it might fail, and that if it succeeds, you'll never be able to forgive yourself for all those wasted years.

Neurotics have plenty of non-neurotic friends, but not for long.

One day you are an apprentice, and everybody's pet; the next, you are coldly expected to deliver. There is never sufficient warning that the second day is coming.

Desire is in men a hunger, in women only an appetite.

The neurotic thinks himself both Hamlet and Claudius, in a world that belongs to Polonius.

Neurotics would like to sleep all the time, and to be awakened only when there is good news.

Men really prefer reasonably attractive women; they go after the sensational ones to impress other men.

Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we have never had, for the first involves knowledge and pleasure, the second only ignorance and pain.

Age is a slowing down of everything except fear.

One of life's few really reliable pleasures: to have a family you love, and to leave them for a week.

A bore: one who knows as well as you do what he is going to say next.

It's impossible to be loyal to your family, your friends, your country, and your principles, all at the same time.

We are never more self-righteous than when giving up what we should have shunned all along.

Spring, summer, and fall fill us with hope; winter alone reminds us of the human condition.

We always prefer war on our own terms to peace on someone else's.

I tell you this, and I tell you plain: What you have done, you will do again; You will bite your tongue, careful or not, Upon the already-bitten spot.

Some women love only what they can hold in their arms; others, only what they can't.

When women feel they have learned to forgive their mothers - and men, their fathers - all it usually means is that they've decided to allow themselves the same kind of behavior.

Few of us could bear to have ourselves for neighbors.

Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others. Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang, a pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness, based on the tacit understanding that this is not for keeps; that any limb you climb out on will still be there later for you to climb back.

If you have to do it every day, for God's sake learn to do it well.