Mignon McLaughlin Quotes - Page 5

Few of us could bear to have ourselves for neighbors.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

We sometimes feel that we have been really understood, but it was always long ago, by someone now dead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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