Mignon McLaughlin Quotations | Page 3

Desire creates havoc when it is the only thing between two people, or when it is what's missing.

Spiritual sloth, or acedia, was known as The Sin of the Middle Ages. It's the sin of my middle age, too.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

We are keenly aware of the faults of our friends, but if they like us enough it doesn't matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In youth we are plagued by desire; in later years, by the desire to feel desire.

Acedia is not in every dictionary; just in every heart.

Spite is never lonely; envy always tags along.

Many marriages are simply working partnerships between businessmen and housekeepers.

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

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.

Others settle for small rewards; the neurotic must always go for broke.

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

Of all second-class citizens, neurotics are the only ones who are so by choice.

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

Neurotics always feel as though they were going way up or way down, which is odd in people going sideways.

A doctor recently described to me "benign positional vertigo": it means you get dizzy in certain positions, but you can get over it without necessarily changing the position. Change "vertigo" to "anxiety," and you've summed up the neurotic's plight.

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

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

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

Neurotics are always looking for something new to overdo.

Neurosis is no worse than a bad cold; you ache all over, and it's made you a mess, but you won't die from it.

The neurotic circles ceaselessly above a fogged-in airport.

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

A love that lasts for twenty years may be better than love, but it isn't love.

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

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

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

Your best work always seems to have been done by someone else.

A woman will do anything to keep a pretty figure, but hardly anything to get one.

God and the devil lose to a common enemy: inertia.

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

I wish I'd said it first, and I don't even know who did: The only problems that money can solve are money problems.

A woman's mink coat represents the sacrifice of a lot of little animals, including her husband.

As we are human, we can't do what we can't do; as we're neurotic, we can't do what we can.

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

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

The way the neurotic sees it: bars on his door mean that he's locked in; bars on your door mean that he's locked out.

If only we could be old and sick while we're still young and healthy enough to put up with it!

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

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.

Things are never so bad that they can't get worse. But they're sometimes so bad they can't get better.

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.

A good executive is one who makes people contentedly settle for less than they meant to get, in return for more than they meant to give.

We cough because we can't help it, but others do it on purpose.

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.

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

At night, neurotics may toil not, but oh how they spin!

Humiliation is a vast country of imprecise boundaries. If you think you're there, you are. The neurotic rule: when in doubt, go ahead and feel humiliated.

The neurotic would like to trust his analyst - if only because he's paying him so much money. But he can't - because if the analyst really cared, he'd be doing it for nothing.

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

In the theater, as in life, we prefer a villain with a sense of humor to a hero without one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being neurotic is like shooting fish in a barrel, and missing them.

If the second marriage really succeeds, the first one didn't really fail.

Not for nothing does the neurotic suffer - but not for anything very much, either.

The young do not need God, and the old cannot find Him.

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

When the pressures really mount, the neurotic must choose: Shall he have a good cry, or set fire to his neighbor's house?

Most of our diversions do not so much delay death as accustom us to it.

People find it hard to be both comic and serious, though life manages it easily enough.

Elegimos aquellos que nos gusta, con los que amamos, no tenemos voz en el asunto.

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

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

Each day, the American housewife turns toward television as toward a lover. She feels guilty about it, and well she might, for he's covered with warts and is only after her money.

So long as God reveals Himself, or doesn't, He is behaving like God.

We work for praise, and dawdle once we have it.

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

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

You can't truthfully explain your smallest action without fully revealing your character.

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

Women are never landlocked: they're always mere minutes away from the briny deep of tears.

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

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

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

All women are basically in competition with each other for a handful of eligible men.

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

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

If I knew why I worried so much, I wouldn't worry.

Men enjoy being thought of as hunters, but are generally too lazy to hunt. Women, on the other hand, love to hunt, but would rather nobody knew it.

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

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

Throughout our lives, we see in the mirror the same innocent trusting face we have seen there since childhood.

Forget about calories — everything makes thin people thinner, and fat people fatter.