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Mignon McLaughlin
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“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.”
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“An artist usually has no friends except other artists, and usually they do not like his work.”
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“It's important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to the friendship that we are not.”
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“The know-nothings are, unfortunately, seldom the do-nothings.”
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“We cough because we can't help it, but others do it on purpose.”
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“After he has had his tantrum, the neurotic expects those around him to feel friendly and relaxed; after all, he does.”
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“'Pull yourself together' is seldom said to anyone who can.”
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“The trouble with women is men; the trouble with men, men.”
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“When the pressures really mount, the neurotic must choose: Shall he have a good cry, or set fire to his neighbor's house?”
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“We can never understand other people's motives, nor their furniture.”
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“The fault no child ever loses is the one he was most punished for.”
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“Learning too soon our limitations, we never learn our powers.”
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“There are children born to be children, and others who must mark time till they can take their natural places as adults.”
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“We lavish on animals the love we are afraid to show people. They might not return it; or worse, they might.”
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“If the second marriage really succeeds, the first one didn't really fail.”
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“No one has ever loved anyone the way everyone wants to be loved.”
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“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.”
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“A perfect marriage is one in which 'I'm sorry' is said just often enough.”
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“We welcome passion, for the mind is briefly let off duty.”
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“Boredom is often the cause of promiscuity, and always its result.”
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“Beauty often fades, but seldom so swiftly as the joy it gives us.”
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“The only mothers it is safe to forget on Mother's Day are the good ones.”
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“Even in the same family, one child will always instinctively know when to ask for things, and another won't.”
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“When hope is hungry, everything feeds it.”
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“If you see in your children most of your own faults, you have failed as a parent, but succeeded as a neurotic.”
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“No good neurotic finds it difficult to be both opinionated and indecisive.”
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“Women are the right age for just a few years; men, for most of their lives.”
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“Nymphomaniac: a woman as obsessed with sex as an average man.”
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“The proud man can learn humility, but he will be proud of it.”
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“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.”
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“Spite is never lonely; envy always tags along.”
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“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.”
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“Others follow patterns; we alone are unpredictable.”
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“Even cowards can endure hardship; only the brave can endure suspense.”
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“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.”
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“The first two days of a vacation are endless; then it flies.”
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“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.”
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“The best work is done with the heart breaking, or overflowing.”
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“Love looks forward, hate looks back, anxiety has eyes all over its head.”
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“When we discuss those we love with those who do not love them, the end of love is near.”
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“When first we fall in love, we feel that we know all there is to know about life, and perhaps we are right.”
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“One of life's few really reliable pleasures: to have a family you love, and to leave them for a week.”
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“Tragedy isn't getting something, or failing to get it; it's losing something you already have.”
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“Make a habit of telling the truth, or make a habit of lying: to decide each case on its own merits is exhausting, and hardly ever worth it.”
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“The fault we admit to is seldom the fault we have, but it has a certain relationship to it, a somewhat similar shape, like that of a sleeve to an arm.”
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“If you can tell anyone about it, it's not the worst thing you ever did.”
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“Courage can't see around corners, but goes around them anyway.”
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“At night, neurotics may toil not, but oh how they spin!”
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“Revenge leads to an empty fullness, like eating dirt.”
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“Not for nothing does the neurotic suffer — but not for anything very much, either.”
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“Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent.”
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“Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to weave.”
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“Neurotic quarrels always have the same theme-song: Hate me and get it over with.”
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“If you made a list of the 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.”
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“We are irritated by rascals, intolerant of fools, and prepared to love the rest. But where are they?”
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“The hardest-learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind.”
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“It must infuriate our children to see us always so much more forbearing with everybody else's.”
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“Don't ask others to forgive in you a sin they're dying to commit themselves.”
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“We are never more self-righteous than when giving up what we should have shunned all along.”
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“Neurotics would like to sleep all the time, and to be awakened only when there is good news.”
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“The three horrors of modern life — talk without meaning, desire without love, work without satisfaction.”
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“The first-rate mind is always curious, compassionate, original, and pessimistic.”
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“In the theater, as in life, we prefer a villain with a sense of humor to a hero without one.”
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“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.”
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“Everybody can write; writers can't do anything else.”
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“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.”
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“Many are saved from sin by being so inept at it.”
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“Despair is anger with no place to go.”
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“Those who turn to God for comfort may find comfort but I do not think they will find God.”
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“We'd all like a reputation for generosity, and we'd all like to buy it cheap.”
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“The neurotic longs to touch bottom, so at least he won't have that to worry about any more.”
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“It's hard to feel middle-aged, because how can you tell how long you are going to live?”
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“There is always some specific moment when we realize our youth is gone; but years after, we know it was much later.”
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“Traditions are group efforts to keep the unexpected from happening.”
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“The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it.”
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“My thoughts, I guess, are bitter: who but the bitter have thoughts?”
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“Age is a slowing down of everything except fear.”
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“In retrospect, our triumphs could as easily have happened to someone else; but our defeats are uniquely our own.”
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“Anything you do from the heart enriches you, but sometimes not till years later.”
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“Throughout our lives, we see in the mirror the same innocent trusting face we have seen there since childhood.”
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“Learn a little of anything, and you're ready to proselytize.”
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“What you can't get out of, get into wholeheartedly.”
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“We are seldom happy with what we now have, but would go to pieces if we lost any part of it.”
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“No matter how brilliantly an idea is stated, we will not really be moved unless we have already half-thought of it ourselves.”
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“Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers.”
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“One day you are an apprentice, and everybody's pet; the next, you are coldly expected to deliver. There is never sufficient warning that the second day is coming.”
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“In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing.”
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“A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.”
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“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.”
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“No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why.”
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“When a man falls in love, he wants to go to bed. When a woman falls in love, she wants to talk about it.”
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“We often pray to be better, when in truth we only want to feel better.”
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“What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.”
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“For the happiest life, days should be rigorously planned, nights left open to chance.”
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“Things are never so bad that they can't get worse. But they're sometimes so bad they can't get better.”
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“Likely as not, the child you can do the least with will do the most to make you proud.”
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“Nobody knows the trouble we've seen — but we keep trying to tell them.”
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“Failure can get to be a rather comfortable old friend.”
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“Neurotics are sure that no one understands them, and they wouldn't have it any other way.”
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“If you are brave too often, people will come to expect it of you.”
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“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.”
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“The fear of being laughed at makes cowards of us all.”
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“The young are generally in full revolt, and are often pretty revolting about it.”
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“Character is what emerges from all the little things you were too busy to do yesterday, but did anyway.”
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“If only we could be old and sick while we're still young and healthy enough to put up with it!”
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“Neurotics expect you to remember all the things that they tell you, and many that they don't.”
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“It's the most unhappy people who most fear change.”
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“I know which side my bread is buttered on: the side which falls on the carpet.”
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“There are a handful of people whom money won't spoil, and we all count ourselves among them.”
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“We're all born brave, trusting, and greedy, and most of us remain greedy.”
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“Money: in its absence, we are coarse; in its presence, we are vulgar.”
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“A car is useless in New York, essential everywhere else. The same with good manners.”
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“Healthy parakeets have the nervous energy of tennis players.”
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“Don't look for God where He is needed most; if you didn't bring Him there, He isn't there.”
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“Most sermons sound to me like commercials — but I can't make out whether God is the Sponsor or the Product.”
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“When you let money speak for you, it drowns out anything else that you meant to say.”
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“There are so many things that we wish we had done yesterday, so few that we feel like doing today.”
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“Creative work is one of life's greatest pleasures, and the only one we will gladly interrupt.”
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“It took man thousands of years to put words down on paper, and his lawyers still wish he wouldn't.”
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“To talk easily with people, you must firmly believe that either you or they are interesting. And even then it's not easy.”
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“Neurotics have plenty of non-neurotic friends, but not for long.”
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“A bore: one who knows as well as you do what he is going to say next.”
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“Most of us become parents long before we have stopped being children.”
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“Most of us would rather risk catastrophe than read the directions.”
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“If I knew what I was so anxious about, I wouldn't be so anxious.”
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“The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next.”
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“The next voice you hear will undoubtedly be your own.”
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“The time to begin most things is ten years ago.”
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“It's innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn't.”
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“My doctor is nice; every time I see him I'm ashamed of what I think about doctors in general.”
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“Our strength is often composed of the weakness that we're damned if we're going to show.”
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“The head never rules the heart, but just becomes its partner in crime.”
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“We always prefer war on our own terms to peace on someone else's.”
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“Men who don't like girls with brains don't like girls.”
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“Life is a mixed blessing, which we vainly try to unmix.”
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“We are all such a waste of our potential, like three-way lamps using one-way bulbs.”
Mignon McLaughlin, U.S. writer, humorist
(1913 - 1983)