Mignon McLaughlin Quotes

Love is often gentle, desire always a rage.

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

Children lack morality, but they also lack fake morality.

If you are brave too often people will come to expect it of you.

Every society honours its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

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

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

It’s easy enough to get along with a loved and loving child—at least till you try to get him to do something.

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

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

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

Learning too soon our limitations we never learn our powers.

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.

Only where children gatheris there any real chance of fun.

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

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

Our strength is often composed of the weakness that we're damned if we are going to show.

Most of us would rather risk a catastrophe than read the instructions.

We'd all like a reputation for generosity and we'd all like to buy it cheap.

A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.

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

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

What you can't get out of get into wholeheartedly.

It's innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn't.

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

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.

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

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

The death of someone we know always reminds us that we are still alive - perhaps for some purpose which we ought to re-examine.

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

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

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

We'd all like a reputation for generosity and we'd all like to buy it cheap.

No one has ever loved anyone the way everyone wants to be loved.