Mignon mclaughlin quotes

We often pray to be better, when in truth we only want to feel better.

The woman just ahead of you at the supermarket checkout has all the delectable groceries you didn't even know they carried.

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

The proud man can learn humility, but he will be proud of it.

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

Love unlocks doors and opens windows that weren't even there before.

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

Theatre audiences can't be made to think and cry: at best, they can be made to think and laugh, or to feel and cry.

Hate leaves ugly scars, love leaves beautiful ones.

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

We can never understand other people's motives, nor their furniture.

Anything you lose automatically doubles in value.

The plague of government is senile delinquency.

The past is rich in lessons from which we would greatly profit except that the present is always so full of Special Circumstances.

Men prefer brief praise, pitched high; women are satisfied with praise in a lower key, just so it goes on and on.

Even cowards can endure hardship; only the brave can endure suspense.

Many beautiful women have been made happy by their own beauty, but no intelligent woman has ever been made happy by her own intelligence.

Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent.

Vanity, revenge, loneliness, boredom, all apply: lust is one of the least of the reasons for promiscuity.

Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

Many things can make you miserable for weeks; few can bring you a whole day of happiness.

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.

I know which side my bread is buttered on: the side which falls on the carpet.

Once you become self-conscious, there is no end to it; once you start to doubt, there is no room for anything else.

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

We are all such a waste of our potential, like three-way lamps using one-way bulbs.

Whatever we worship, short of God, is sure to be our undoing.

Good food, good sex, good digestion, good sleep: to these basic animal pleasures, man has added nothing but the good cigarette.

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

There is always some specific moment when we become aware that our youth is gone; but, years after, we know it was much later.

With each passing year, one has less to say, and knows better how to say it.

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

Every creature stalks some other, catches it, and is caught.

True remorse is never just a regret over consequences; it is a regret over motive.

Most sermons sound to me like commercials - but I can't make out whether God is the Sponsor or the Product.

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

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

Don't be yourself - be someone a little nicer.

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

Minor vices lead to major ones, but minor virtues stay put.

Few of us write great novels; all of us live them.

What we forgive too freely doesn't stay forgiven.

Courage can't see around corners but goes around them anyway.

Learning too soon our limitations, we never learn our powers.

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

Every day of our lives we are on the verge of making those slight changes that would make all the difference.

Everybody can write; writers can't do anything else.

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

Money: in its absence, we are coarse; in its presence, we are vulgar.

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

Spite is never lonely; envy always tags along.

The total history of almost anyone would shock almost everyone.

The three horrors of modern life - talk without meaning, desire without love, work without satisfaction.

You will turn over many a futile new leaf till you learn we must all write on scratched-out pages.

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

The head never rules the heart, but just becomes its partner in crime.

Most of us become parents long before we have stopped being children.

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

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

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

Life is a mixed blessing, which we vainly try to unmix.

Loneliness, insomnia, and change: the fear of these is even worse than the reality.

The fear of being laughed at makes cowards of us all.

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

Love looks forward, hate looks back, anxiety has eyes all over its head.

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

The ideal home: big enough for you to hear the children, but not very well.

There are always a few people you do a lot for, and a few who do a lot for you, but they're not the same people.

With men, as with women, the main struggle is between vanity and comfort; but with men, comfort often wins.

For the happiest life, days should be rigorously planned, nights left open to chance.

No one ever loved anyone the way that person wanted to be loved.

Few of us could bear to have ourselves for neighbors.

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.

We lavish on animals the love we are afraid to show to people. They might not return it; or worse, they might.

Character is what emerges from all the little things you were too busy to do yesterday, but did anyway.

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

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

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

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

There are so many things that we wish we had done yesterday, so few that we feel like doing today.

My thoughts, I guess, are bitter; who but the bitter have thoughts?

The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it.

The hardest-learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind.

A first-rate marriage is like a first-rate hotel: expensive, but worth it.

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

In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing.

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

We're seldom drawn to a character we admire; only to a personality we like.

It does not undo harm to acknowledge that we have done it; but it undoes us not to acknowledge it.

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

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

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

When threatened, the first thing a democracy gives up is democracy.

No good neurotic finds it difficult to be both opinionated and indecisive.

Those who turn to God for comfort may find comfort but I do not think they will find God.

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

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

Ma-ma does everything for the baby, who responds by saying Da-da first.

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

Fields can lie fallow but we can't; we have less time.

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

What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.

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

Anything you do from the heart enriches you, but sometimes not till years later.

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

Every group feels strong once it has found a scapegoat.

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.

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

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

The time to begin most things is ten years ago.

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.

If you made a list of reasons why any couple got married, and another list of the reasons for their divorce, you'd have a hell of a lot of overlapping.

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

Flesh goes on pleasuring us, and humiliating us, right to the end.

Love is often gentle, desire always a rage.

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

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

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

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

There's nothing wrong with most men's egos that the kowtowing of a headwaiter can't cure.

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

It is always safe to tell people that they're looking wonderful.

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.

Every now and then you run across radiantly attractive people and you're delighted to find they adore you, till you realize that they adore just about everybody - and that's what's made them radiantly attractive.

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