Quotes from Mignon McLaughlin

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

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

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

In youth we are plagued by desire; in later years, by the desire to feel desire.

Failure can get to be a rather comfortable old friend.

In any family, measles are less contagious than bad habits.

There's an awful lot of blood around that water is thicker than.

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

The fear of being laughed at makes cowards of us all.

You will turn over many a futile new leaf till you learn we must all write on scratched-out pages.

Life is a mixed blessing, which we vainly try to unmix

The woman just ahead of you at the supermarket checkout has all the delectable groceries you didn't even know they carried.

True remorse is never just a regret over consequences; it is a regret over motive.

We are keenly aware of the faults of our friends, but if they like us enough it doesn't matter.

Tough and funny and a little bit kind: that is as near to perfection as a human being can be.

It upsets women to be, or not to be, stared at hungrily.

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

A woman telling her true age is like a buyer confiding his final price to an Armenian rug dealer.

You must love yourself before you love another. By accepting yourself and fully being what you are, your simple presence can make others happy.

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

The hardest-learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind

All love is probationary, a fact which frightens women and exhilarates men

The excesses of love soon pass, but its insufficiencies torment us forever

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