Daily Inspiration Quote by Mignon McLaughlin

McLaughlin’s line doesn’t romanticize love as a candle in the dark; it treats it as renovation. “Unlocks doors” is the familiar metaphor: love grants access, makes the closed-off reachable. The sharper move is the second half: “opens windows that weren’t even there before.” That’s not permission, it’s invention. Love doesn’t just change what you can do inside the existing architecture of a life; it changes the architecture itself.

As a journalist and aphorist, McLaughlin wrote for readers who understood domestic routine, social etiquette, and the quiet, daily negotiations of intimacy. In mid-century America, where emotional life was often pressed into the mold of propriety, this metaphor carries a sly subtext: love is not merely comforting, it’s disruptive in the best way. It rearranges what you thought were fixed limits - on vulnerability, ambition, forgiveness, even imagination. The “weren’t even there before” clause implies that our prior selves aren’t simply locked up; they’re underbuilt. We didn’t know what views were possible because we didn’t know to look for them.

The intent is both hopeful and slightly chastening. If love can create new openings, then the loveless version of life isn’t just lonelier; it’s smaller and more poorly ventilated. There’s an implied critique of emotional austerity: you can’t “work hard enough” to manufacture certain kinds of spaciousness. They arrive through attachment, through the risk of letting someone matter.