Mignon McLaughlin Quotes

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

Your children vividly remember every unkind thing you ever did to them, plus a few you really didn't.

A new wound makes all the old ones ache again.

Good-looking girls break hearts, and goodhearted girls mend them.

Hot dogs always seem better out than at home; so do French-fried potatoes; so do your children.

There are whole years for which I hope I'll never be cross-examined, for I could not give an alibi.

The neurotic always wishes people would let him alone - until they do.

I often pray, though I'm not really sure Anyone's listening; and I phrase it carefully, just in case He's literary.

Too much money is as demoralizing as too little, and there's no such thing as exactly enough.

If it came true, it wasn't much of a dream.

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.

The neurotic is always half-drowning in anxiety, and always being half-rescued.

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.

An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners' names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought.

Children lack morality, but they also lack fake morality.

Love is the silent saying and saying of a single name.

A woman telling her true age is like a buyer confiding his final price to an Armenian rug dealer.

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

If you can tell anyone about it, it's not the worst thing you ever did.

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

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

The neurotic believes that life has meaning, but that his life hasn't.

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

Women are afraid of mice and of murder, and of very little in between.

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

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

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

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

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

The neurotic's strongest fantasy is that he has no fantasies. The real is very real to him, the unreal even more so.

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

No one can understand love who has not experienced infatuation. And no one can understand infatuation, no matter how many times he has experienced it.

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.

We catch frightful glimpses of ourselves in the hostile eyes of others.

My religious position: I think that God could do a lot better, and I'm willing to give Him the chance.

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

The excesses of love soon pass, but its insufficiencies torment us forever.

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

Says the rude child: "No, I won't do it." Says the courteous grown-up: "Yes, I won't do it.

Some marriages break up, and some do not, and in our world you can usually explain the former better than the latter.

As we grow older, our capacity for enjoyment shrinks, but not our appetite for it.

Puritans will never believe it, but life is full of disagreeable things that aren't even good for you.

Women flirt to keep their stock high, men to get somewhere.

If you're a gifted flirt, talking about the price of eggs will do as well as any other subject.

Surrounded by people who love life, you love it too; surrounded by people who don't, you don't.

Neurotics make poor patriots; if you're ashamed of something as big as yourself, it's hard to be proud of something as small as your country.

The neurotic doesn't know how to cope with his emotional bills; some he keeps paying over and over, others he never pays at all.

What we forgive too freely doesn't stay forgiven.

Neurotics are anxiety prone, accident prone, and often just prone.

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