Mignon McLaughlin (1913 – 1983)
American journalist and author.
Your children tell you casually years later what it would have killed you with worry to know at the time.
Courage can't see around corners but goes around them anyway.
True remorse is never just a regret over consequence; it is a regret over motive.
Few novels or plays could exist without at least one troublemaker in the group, and perhaps life couldn’t either.
He's in for trouble—the man whose wife is detested by all women and desired by all men.
Nymphomaniac: a woman as obsessed with sex as an average man.
When children are bored, it reflects on us all.
'Pull yourself together' is seldom said to anyone who can.
All women are basically in competition with each other for a handful of eligible men.
How can a man marry wisely in his twenties? The girl he's going to wind up wanting hasn't even been born.
Confession is good for the conscience, but it usually bypasses the soul.
Everybody can write; writers can't do anything else.
The neurotic feels as though trapped in a gas-filled room where at any moment someone, probably himself, will strike a match.
What you were sure of yesterday, you know now to be false, but what you are sure of today is absolutely true.
There are whole years for which I hope I’ll never be cross-examined, for I could not give an alibi.
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.
I do not trust those who are above name-dropping. The suppression of small vices always exacts too high a toll.
The neurotic has perfect vision in one eye, but he cannot remember which.
Likely as not, the child you can do the least with will do the most to make you proud.
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.