The Quote Garden ™
I dig old books. ™
Est. 1998
“Neurotic” Quotations
Welcome to my page of quotations about, by, and for neurotics. And of course I use the term loosely. By the by, if you love Mignon McLaughlin's quotes and have trouble finding a copy of her Neurotic's Notebooks from the 1960s, get yourself Aperçus: The Aphorisms of Mignon McLaughlin. It doesn't contain all of them, but most, along with biographical information and photographs. —ღ Terri, 2014
I like neurotic people. I like troubled people. Not that I don't like squared-away people, but I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface. ~Stephen Sondheim
Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces. Never will the world know how much it owes to them, nor what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on us. We enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things, but we do not know what they cost those who wrought them in sleeplessness, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthma, epilepsy, a terror of death which is worse than any of these. ~Marcel Proust
A little neurosis may be a valuable asset, even though a heavy one may be hard to take. ~David Seegal, 1962
The neurotic circles ceaselessly above a fogged-in airport. ~Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983), The Neurotic's Notebook, 1963
The neurotic runs ragged even sitting still. ~Terri Guillemets, "Neurotic Addendum with Compliments & Apologies to Mignon McLaughlin," 2002
You can't escape history, or the needs and neuroses you've picked up like layers and layers of tartar on your teeth.... Your every past action and thought have made you what you are. ~Charles R. Johnson, Faith and the Good Thing, 1974 (Arnold T. Tippis)
My personality could be categorized with some degree of ease under the general umbrella of neurotic. ~Alison Pace, "Are You There, Margaret?," in Everything I Needed to Know about Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume, edited by Jennifer O'Connell, 2007
Neurosis is no worse than a bad cold; you ache all over, and it's made you a mess, but you won't die from it. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1963
The neurotic calls in sick to more than just work — he's sprung ill to Life, as well. ~Terri Guillemets, "Neurotic Addendum with Compliments & Apologies to Mignon McLaughlin," 2002
If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days. ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, 1963
The neurotic longs to touch bottom, so at least he won't have that to worry about anymore. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1963
The secret to happiness in your work is to find a job in which your neurosis is constructive. ~Jeanne LaMont, M.D.
Others settle for small rewards; the neurotic must always go for broke. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1963
Neurotics, when they hit bottom, don't stop falling. ~Terri Guillemets, "Neurotic Addendum with Compliments & Apologies to Mignon McLaughlin," 2002
I'm afraid to win, and afraid to lose; I hate a draw and can't stop competing; otherwise I'm fine. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1963
[Neurotics] complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to taking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young; there is no use in reproaching them with their contradictions. ~Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
And when you get an eminent journal like Time magazine complaining, as it often has, that to the young writers of today life seems short on rewards and that what they write is a product of their own neuroses, in its silly way the magazine is merely stating the status quo and obvious truth. The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads. ~William Styron, interview with Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton, in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, edited by Malcolm Cowley, 1958
The neurotic's mountain and molehill are equivalent in size. ~Terri Guillemets, "Neurotic Addendum with Compliments & Apologies to Mignon McLaughlin," 2002
Neurotics would like to sleep all the time, and to be awakened only when there is good news. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1963
The anguish of the neurotic is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same struggle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first wastes and the other gives. ~Georges Bataille, translated by Stuart Kendall
I'm a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world.
I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.
~Anaïs Nin, journal, 1933
Don't offer a neurotic happiness — he'll never take it. There's a bout of misery keeping him perfectly content. ~Terri Guillemets, "Neurotic Addendum with Compliments & Apologies to Mignon McLaughlin," 2002
The neurotic is always half-drowning in anxiety, and always being half-rescued. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1963
Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering. ~Carl Jung (1875–1961)
Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly... If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient? ~Marcel Proust, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
A neurotic whose problems are solved was never a neurotic to begin with. ~Terri Guillemets, "Neurotic Addendum with Compliments & Apologies to Mignon McLaughlin," 2002
The neurotic doesn't know how to cope with his emotional bills; some he keeps paying over and over, others he never pays at all. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1963
One will always find that neurotics cling tenaciously to their reassuring ideals. ~Alfred Adler, "Conclusion," The Neurotic Constitution, 1917
Annie, when you're attracted to someone it just means that your subconscious is attracted to their subconscious, subconsciously, so what we think of as fate is just two neuroses knowing that they are a perfect match. ~Nora Ephron, David S. Ward, and Jeff Arch, Sleepless in Seattle, 1993
Overcast with drizzles — O! we neurotics welcome the riddance of that pesky sunshine. ~Terri Guillemets, "Neurotic Addendum with Compliments & Apologies to Mignon McLaughlin," 2002
The neurotic's strongest fantasy is that he has no fantasies. The real is very real to him, the unreal even more so. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1963
But the center can be a harmful place for one who has lived so long on the edge... Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization. ~Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, 1976
At the beginning of a love affair, not even the neurotic is neurotic. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966, ©Thomas Paine McLaughlin
A constant din of alarms sound in the neurotic's head — only silence indicates something gone wrong. ~Terri Guillemets, "Neurotic Addendum with Compliments & Apologies to Mignon McLaughlin," 2002
I guess I'm not the dreamy neurotic old fool I sometimes think I am. ~John Gunther, Jr. (1929–1947), journal, 1946
The neurotic has perfect vision in one eye, but he cannot remember which. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1963
...the poet is a liar, a misfit, or a neurotic... ~Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, Indiana University, 1962
That is the whole difference: for the poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy. ~Lionel Trilling (1905–1975), "Freud and Literature," in Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art, 1947
Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of "progress," but only by viewing history as a neurosis. ~Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death
No good neurotic finds it difficult to be both opinionated and indecisive. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1963
A neurotic is the man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. And a psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent. ~Lord Robert Webb-Johnstone, as quoted in Maurice B. Strauss, Familiar Medical Quotations, 1968
The overweight neurotic turned thin has mental weight she'll never lose. ~Terri Guillemets, "Neurotic Addendum with Compliments & Apologies to Mignon McLaughlin," 2002
The neurotic thinks himself both Hamlet and Claudius, in a world that belongs to Polonius. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1963
Actually, psychiatrists classify a person as neurotic if he suffers from his problems in living, and as psychotic if he makes others suffer. ~Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin, 1973
...one's neuroses have possibilities of beauty. ~Anaïs Nin
If something smells fishy, the neurotic knows everything is going just right. ~Terri Guillemets, "Neurotic Addendum with Compliments & Apologies to Mignon McLaughlin," 2002
The "sensibility" claimed by neurotic people is matched by their egotism; they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an ever increasing attention in themselves. ~Marcel Proust (1871–1922), Remembrance of Things Past, translated from French by Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff
The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions; by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis. ~Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 1927, translated by W. D. Robson-Scott
As we are human, we can't do what we can't do; as we're neurotic, we can't do what we can. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1963
If a neurotic can't stand the heat, he lights another candle. ~Terri Guillemets, "Neurotic Addendum with Compliments & Apologies to Mignon McLaughlin," 2002
Neurotic subjects are perhaps less addicted than any, despite the time-honoured phrase, to "listening to their insides": they can hear so many things going on inside themselves, by which they realise later that they did wrong to let themselves be alarmed, that they end by paying no attention to any of them. Their nervous systems have so often cried out to them for help, as though from some serious malady, when it was merely because snow was coming, or because they had to change their rooms, that they have acquired the habit of paying no more heed to these warnings. ~Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff
Neurotic: someone who can go from the bottom to the top, and back again, without ever once touching the middle. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966, ©Thomas Paine McLaughlin
A considerable number of persons are able to protect themselves against the outbreak of serious neurotic phenomena only through intense work. ~Karl Abraham, in The Psychoanalytic Reader: An Anthology of Essential Papers with Critical Introductions edited by Robert Fliess, 1948
Most neurotics have been mindful of their five W's since grammar school: why, why, why, why, why. ~Terri Guillemets, "Neurotic Addendum with Compliments & Apologies to Mignon McLaughlin," 2002
There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death. ~Fran Lebowitz
published 2002 May 10
revised 2020 Aug 16
last saved 2024 Sep 7
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