Mignon McLaughlin quotes:

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A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
Albert Einstein when asked what he considered to be the most powerful force in the universe answered: Compound interest! What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.
In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing.
For the happiest life, days should be rigorously planned, nights left open to chance.
Youth is not enough. And love is not enough. And success is not enough. And, if we could achieve it, enough would not be enough.
We all become great explorers during our first few days in a new city, or a new love affair.
A woman telling her true age is like a buyer confiding his final price to an Armenian rug dealer.
Even cowards can endure hardship; only the brave can endure suspense.
When suffering comes, we yearn for some sign from God, forgetting we have just had one.
There are a handful of people whom money won't spoil, and we all count ourselves among them.
It's the most unhappy people who most fear change.
Love unlocks doors and opens windows that weren't even there before.
It is important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to friendship that we are not.
We lavish on animals the love we are afraid to show to people. They might not return it; or worse, they might.
Our strength is often composed of the weakness that we're damned if we're going to show.
No matter how brilliantly an idea is stated, we will not really be moved unless we have already half thought of it ourselves.
Few novels or plays could exist without at least one troublemaker in the group, and perhaps life couldn't either.
What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.
In any family, measles are less contagious than bad habits.
It took man thousands of years to put words down on paper, and his lawyers still wish he wouldn't.
A woman telling her true age is like a buyer confiding his final price to an Armenian rug dealer."
The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next.
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.
If I knew what I was so anxious about, I wouldn't be so anxious.
Those who are brutally honest are seldom so with themselves.
We are all such a waste of our potential, like three-way lamps using one-way bulbs.
Most of us become parents long before we have stopped being children.
Love is the silent saying and saying of a single name.
For the happiest life, days should be rigorously planned, nights left open to chance."
It's innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn't."
Confession is good for the conscience, but it usually bypasses the soul.
It's innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn't.
Learning too soon our limitations, we never learn our powers.
The woman just ahead of you at the supermarket checkout has all the delectable groceries you didn't even know they carried.
Only where children gather is there any real chance of fun.
Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.
True remorse is never just a regret over consequences; it is a regret over motive.
We choose those we like; with those we love, we have no say in the matter.
A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.
A sense of humor is a major defense against minor troubles.
The plague of government is senile delinquency.
There are now electrical appliances with the main unit so sealed in that it cannot be got at for repair. There have always been human beings like that.
Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others. Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang, a pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness, based on the tacit understanding that this is not for keeps; that any limb you climb out on will still be there later for you to climb back.
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.
What we forgive too freely doesn't stay forgiven.
All women are basically in competition with each other for a handful of eligible men.
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.
We'd all like a reputation for generosity, and we'd all like to buy it cheap.
A car is useless in New York, essential everywhere else. The same with good manners.
Good food, good sex, good digestion, good sleep: to these basic animal pleasures, man has added nothing but the good cigarette.
We are all born brave, trusting and greedy, and most of us remain greedy.
Be glad that you're greedy; the national economy would collapse if you weren't.
The hardest learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind.
There are so many things that we wish we had done yesterday, so few that we feel like doing today.
Desire creates havoc when it is the only thing between two people, or when it is what's missing.
The best work is done with the heart breaking, or overflowing.
A first-rate marriage is like a first-rate hotel: expensive, but worth it.
A hypochondriac is one who has a pill for everything except what ails him.
A perfect marriage is one in which "I'm sorry" is said just often enough.
No good neurotic finds it difficult to be both opinionated and indecisive.
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.
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.
Many beautiful women have been made happy by their own beauty, but no intelligent woman has ever been made happy by her own intelligence.
We are irritated by rascals, intolerant of fools, and prepared to love the rest. But where are they?
Many who would not take the last cookie would take the last lifeboat.
Anywhere you go liking everyone, everyone will be likeable.
No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why.
Some women love only what they can hold in their arms; others, only what they can't.
Hate leaves ugly scars, love leaves beautiful ones.
It's easy enough to get along with a loved and loving child - at least till you try to get him to do something.
They threaten me with lung cancer, and still I smoke and smoke. If they'd only threaten me with hard work, I might stop.
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?
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.
Elegimos aquellos que nos gusta, con los que amamos, no tenemos voz en el asunto.
Mumps, measles, and puppy love are terrible after twenty.
A woman's mink coat represents the sacrifice of a lot of little animals, including her husband.
The head never rules the heart, but just becomes its partner in crime.
The three horrors of modern life - talk without meaning, desire without love, work without satisfaction.
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.
The only mothers it is safe to forget on Mother's Day are the good ones.
Neurotics are anxiety prone, accident prone, and often just prone.
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.
At the beginning of a love affair, not even the neurotic is neurotic.
Pity all newlyweds. She cooks something nice for him, and he brings her flowers, and they kiss and think: How easy marriage is.
Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we have never had
Nymphomaniac: a woman as obsessed with sex as an average man.
Altruism is a hard master, but so is opportunism.
Healthy parakeets have the nervous energy of tennis players.
The neurotic thinks himself both Hamlet and Claudius, in a world that belongs to Polonius.
No matter how many Christmas presents you give your child, there's always that terrible moment when he's opened the very last one. That's when he expects you to say, 'Oh yes, I almost forgot,' and take him out and show him the pony.
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.
My religious position: I think that God could do a lot better, and I'm willing to give Him the chance.
The young are generally full of revolt, and are often pretty revolting about it
It's awesome to realize that if your greatest potential talent is for riding a bicycle upside down on a high wire, you will somehow discover it.
Courage can't see around corners, but goes around them anyway.
If the second marriage really succeeds, the first one didn't really fail.
Once you become self-conscious, there is no end to it; once you start to doubt, there is no room for anything else.
Neurotics always feel as though they were going way up or way down, which is odd in people going sideways.
The young are generally full of revolt, and are often pretty revolting about it.
The neurotic is always half-drowning in anxiety, and always being half-rescued.
Most sermons sound to me like commercials - but I can't make out whether God is the Sponsor or the Product.
Spite is never lonely; envy always tags along.
We waste a lot of time running after people we could have caught by just standing still.
Neurotics dream of a good life, or a great suicide note.
Women are never landlocked: they're always mere minutes away from the briny deep of tears.
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.
What a shame that allowances have to stop with the teens: both those that are paid to us and those that are made for us.
The proud man can learn humility, but he will be proud of it.
Women usually love what they buy, yet hate two-thirds of what is in their closets.
Money is much more exciting than anything it buys.
Whatever we worship, short of God, is sure to be our undoing.
Your children vividly remember every unkind thing you ever did to them, plus a few you really didn't.
No one ever loved anyone the way that person wanted to be loved.
What you can't get out of, get into wholeheartedly.
If you hate your lot but wouldn't trade it, it's not your lot you hate.
Many are saved from sin by being so inept at it.
Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
We would all like a reputation for generosity and we'd all like to buy it cheap.

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