Daily Inspiration Quote by Mignon McLaughlin

Hardship is loud: it lands, it bruises, it gives you something solid to push against. Suspense is quieter and, McLaughlin implies, far more diagnostic of character. “Even cowards can endure hardship” isn’t a kindness; it’s a demotion. Pain, poverty, illness, bad luck - these don’t automatically confer nobility. You can survive them by hunkering down, by going numb, by shrinking your world to the next hour. Endurance, in that sense, is sometimes just the body’s stubborn refusal to quit.

The real test arrives in the space before the blow, the corridor of “not yet.” “Only the brave can endure suspense” reframes courage as a psychological skill: staying upright while your mind manufactures outcomes, while control is absent and information is partial. Suspense is where anxiety lives, where imagination turns predatory, where you’re tempted to self-sabotage just to end the waiting. McLaughlin’s line flatters neither stoicism nor melodrama; it praises the unglamorous discipline of tolerating uncertainty without demanding immediate relief.

As a mid-century American journalist and aphorist, McLaughlin wrote in an era steeped in Cold War apprehension, domestic pressures, and the polished etiquette of keeping it together. The sentence’s balance - “hardship” versus “suspense,” “cowards” versus “brave” - works like a moral x-ray. It exposes a culture that romanticizes suffering while underestimating the courage it takes to sit with ambiguity, to delay resolution, to keep faith without guarantees.