Mignon McLaughlin Quotes

Likely as not, the child you can do the least with will do the most to make you proud.

A car is useless in New York, essential everywhere else. The same with good manners.

We climb mountains because they are there, and worship God because He is not.

I've been hiding from God, and I'm appalled to find how easy it is.

Self-confidence grows on trees, in other people's orchards.

Neurotic quarrels always have the same theme-song: Hate me and get it over with.

Be glad that you're greedy; the national economy would collapse if you weren't.

We are seldom happy with what we now have, but would go to pieces if we lost any part of it.

If you jot down every silly thought that pops into your mind, you will soon find out everything you most seriously believe.

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

Don't look for God where He is needed most; if you didn't bring Him there, He isn't there.

An artist usually has no friends except other artists, and usually they do not like his work.

Women polish the silver and water the plants and wait to be really needed.

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

We have to call it "freedom": who'd want to die for "a lesser tyranny"

People keep telling us about their love affairs, when what we really want to know is how much money they make and how they manage on it.

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

Naturally, the neurotic wants you to love him twice as much, for he's going to cut it in half anyway.

I'm always there to tell people that their life is not that bad. I wish it was easy to follow that advice.

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

When suffering comes, we yearn for some sign from God, forgetting we have just had one.

Affairs are just as disillusioning as marriage, and much less restful.

Neurotic: someone who can go from the bottom to the top, and back again, without ever once touching the middle.

Learn a little of anything, and you're ready to proselytize.

When a man falls in love, he wants to go to bed. When a woman falls in love, she wants to talk about it.

The neurotic feels as though trapped in a gas-filled room where at any moment someone, probably himself, will strike a match.

The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next.

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

A sense of humor is a major defense against minor troubles.

When the pain is great enough, we will let anyone be doctor.

Without enthusiasm, virtue functions not at all, and vice only poorly.

There are a handful of people whom money won't spoil, and we all count ourselves among them.

Life marks us all down, so it's just as well that we start out by overpricing ourselves.

There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write.

If your husband expects you to laugh, do so; if he expects you to cry, don't; if you don't know what he expects, what are you doing married?

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

Comfort, or revelation: God owes us one of these, but surely not both.

If you hate your lot but wouldn't trade it, it's not your lot you hate.

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

Most of us would rather risk catastrophe than read the directions ...

There are three iron links in the neurotic's chain: unloving, unlovable, unloved.

In life, as in restaurants, we swallow a lot of indigestible stuff just because it comes with the dinner.

The soul may sleep and the body still be happy, but only in youth.

Tragedy isn't getting something, or failing to get it; it's losing something you already have.

They threaten me with lung cancer, and still I smoke and smoke. If they'd only threaten me with hard work, I might stop.

Beauty often fades, but seldom so swiftly as the joy it gives us.

It must infuriate our children to see us always so much more forbearing with everybody else's.

We welcome passion, for the mind is briefly let off duty.

The first two days of a vacation are endless; then it flies.

Nymphomaniac: a woman as obsessed with sex as an average man.

All love is probationary, a fact which frightens women and exhilarates men.

Men who don't like girls with brains don't like girls.

Love is often gentle, desire always a rage.

It's wonderful to watch a pretty woman with character grow beautiful.

A new wound makes all the old ones ache again.

Men feel that women somehow drag them down, and women feel that way about men. It's possible that both are right.

It's the most unhappy people who most fear change.

When their children fail to charm others, few parents can stay neutral.

The next voice you hear will undoubtedly be your own.

A perfect marriage is one in which "I'm sorry" is said just often enough.

Many who would not take the last cookie would take the last lifeboat.

If I knew what I was so anxious about, I wouldn't be so anxious.

Despair is anger with no place to go.

A woman ought to look up to her husband, if only a half-inch.

To talk easily with people, you must firmly believe that either you or they are interesting. And even then it's not easy.

The neurotic has perfect vision in one eye, but he cannot remember which.

If an article is attractive, or useful, or inexpensive, they'll stop making it tomorrow; if it's all three, they stopped making it yesterday.

A parent who has never apologized to his children is a monster. If he's always apologizing, his children are monsters.

The trouble with women is men; the trouble with men, men.

I'm glad I don't have to explain to a man from Mars why each day I set fire to dozens of little pieces of paper, and then put them in my mouth.

Failure can get to be a rather comfortable old friend.

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

Tough and funny and a little bit kind: that is as near to perfection as a human being can be.

Few women care what a man looks like, and a good thing too.

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

How strange that the young should always think the world is against them - when in fact that is the only time it is for them.

Women usually love what they buy, yet hate two-thirds of what is in their closets.

Many of us are equal to life's emergencies who cannot bear its day-after-dayness.

A husband only worries about a particular Other Man; a wife distrusts her whole species.

To smoke or not to smoke: I can make of either a life-work.

You never realize how tacky your furniture is till you try to give it to the Salvation Army and they won't take it.

It is important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to friendship that we are not.

Nobody knows the trouble we've seen-but we keep trying to tell them.

The fault we admit to is seldom the fault we have, but it has a certain relationship to it, a somewhat similar shape, like that of a sleeve to an arm.

At the beginning of a love affair, not even the neurotic is neurotic.

Don't ask others to forgive in you a sin they're dying to commit themselves.

It upsets women to be, or not to be, stared at hungrily.

A hypochondriac is one who has a pill for everything except what ails him.

Only where children gather
is there any real chance of fun.

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

Women are good listeners, but it's a waste of time telling your troubles to a man unless there's something specific you want him to do.

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

Even in the same family, one child will always instinctively know when to ask for things, and another won't.

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

Pull yourself together' is seldom said to anyone who can.

Boredom is often the cause of promiscuity, and always its result.

When you let money speak for you, it drowns out anything else you meant to say.

Your money, or your life. We know what to do when a burglar makes this demand of us, but not when God does.

Many of us go through life feeling as an actor might feel who does not like his part and does not believe in the play.

The neurotic listens to weather reports about Small Craft Warnings, and he thinks: They're talking about me.