Mignon McLaughlin Quotes

Everything about me remembers everything about you

You can't just plan a moment when things get back on track, just as you can't plan the moment you lose your way in the first place. But standing there alone on the landing, I thought of Grandma Halley and how she'd held me close against her lap as we watched the sky together. I'd always thought I couldn't remember, but suddenly in that moment, I closed my eyes and saw the comet, finally, brilliant and impossible, stretching above me across the sky.

Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

I think we've all been kind of... everyone's been hurt, everyone's felt loss, everyone has exultation, everyone has a need to be loved, or to have lost love, so when you play a character, you're pulling out those little threads and turning them up a bit.

An exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss.

If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.

Whenever it rains you will think of her.

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so that's what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so they'd really sink in, so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the paint and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his.

He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.

She taught me to play the piano, and what it meant to miss somebody.

Long since, the desert wind wiped away our footprints in the sand. But at every second of my existence, I remember what happened, and you still walk in my dreams and in my reality. Thank you for having crossed my path.

And for the briefest instant, it almost feels like we're together again.

When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows.

When you love something, it never goes away.

As human beings, we need to know that we are not alone, that we are not crazy or completely out of our minds, that there are other people out there who feel as we do, live as we do, love as we do, who are like us.

I'm drawn to people who share that sense of loss. All actors are trying to repair damaged relationships. I think that might be why I've been drawn to other actors.

This house was our dream-the gardens, the study, even the swimming pool. Even though I can't see John when I wake up in the morning, I can always feel him here with me.

Do you know what people want more than anything? They want to be missed. They want to be missed the day they don't show up. They want to be missed when they're gone.

I turn to books for a feeling of companionship: for somebody knowing what I have known.

I talk to Simon, I write to him. I never used to write a diary. But now I'm writing a diary to him. I think it's not just me, but lots of others, family and friends, can still feel him around.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone's singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person.

Music makes time fall away like almost nothing else. You hear a song from another moment of your life, and it really is like you're still there.

The more specific you are about a very general feeling of loneliness is actually how you connect with people.

One of my impulses in acting has always to make people feel less alone.