Quotes by Mignon McLaughlin

“If you made a list of reasons why any couple got married, and another list of the reasons for their divorce, youd have a lot of overlapping.”

“Divorce is the psychological equivalent of a triple coronary by-pass. After such a monumental assault on the heart, it takes years to amend all the habits and attitudes that led up to it.”

“In every marriage more than a week old, there are grounds for divorce. The trick is to find, and continue to find, grounds for marriage.”

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

“Many divorces are not really the result of irreparable injury but involve, instead, a desire on the part of the man or woman to shatter the setup, start out from scratch alone, and make life work for them all over again. They want the risk of disaster, want to touch bottom, see where bottom is, and, coming up, to breathe the air with relief and relish again.”

“Divorce begins with too many unspoken words and things at the end of the day.”

“So many persons think divorce a panacea for every ill, who find out, when they try it, that the remedy is worse than the disease”

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

“Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent”

“The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one minute to the next”

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

“Its the most unhappy people who most fear change.”

“When suffering comes, we yearn for some sign from God, forgetting we have just had one.”

“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.”

“There are so many things that we wish we had done yesterday, so few that we feel like doing today.”

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

Theres only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and thats a writer sitting down to write.

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

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

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.