Mary McCarthy quotes
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We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.
-- Mary McCarthy -
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
-- Mary McCarthy -
We are the hero of our own story.
-- Mary McCarthy -
The idea of Macbeth as a conscience-torm ented man is a platitude as false as Macbeth himself. Macbeth has no conscience. His main concern throughout the play is that most selfish of all concerns: to get a good night's sleep.
-- Mary McCarthy -
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Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.
-- Mary McCarthy -
What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.
-- Mary McCarthy -
In violence, we forget who we are
-- Mary McCarthy -
If someone tells you he is going to make a 'realistic decision', you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.
-- Mary McCarthy -
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In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.
-- Mary McCarthy -
There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.
-- Mary McCarthy -
I was going to get myself recognized at any price. If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to do it by badness.
-- Mary McCarthy -
The consumer today is the victim of the manufacturer who launches on him a regiment of products for which he must make room in his soul.
-- Mary McCarthy -
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it came to me, as we sat there, glumly ordering lunch, that for extremely stupid people anti-Semitism was a form of intellectuality, the sole form of intellectuality of which they were capable. It represented, in a rudimentary way, the ability to make categories, to generalize.
-- Mary McCarthy -
Yet friendship, I believe, is essential to intellectuals. It is probably the growth hormone the mind requires as it begins its activity of producing and exchanging ideas. You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk. In the course of my history, not love or marriage so much as friendship has promoted growth.
-- Mary McCarthy -
The fact is that gardening, more than most of our other activities except sometimes love-making, confronts us with the inexplicable.
-- Mary McCarthy -
The furniture and trappings in the apartment are all in a state of flux - here today, gone tomorrow. Nothing is anchored to its place, not even the coffee-pot, which floats off and returns, on the tide of the signora's marine nature.
-- Mary McCarthy -
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this is the spirit of the enchantment under which Venice lies, pearly and roseate, like the Sleeping Beauty, changeless throughout the centuries, arrested, while the concrete forest of the modern world grows up around her.
-- Mary McCarthy -
Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.
-- Mary McCarthy -
The breakdown of our language, evident in the misuse, i.e., the misunderstanding of nouns and adjectives, is most grave, though perhaps not so conspicuous, in the handling of prepositions, those modest little connectives that hold the parts of a phrase or a sentence together. They are the joints of any language, what make it, literally, articulate.
-- Mary McCarthy -
Our language, once homely and colloquial, seeks to aggrandize our meanest activities with polysyllabic terms or it retreats from frankness into a stammering verbosity.
-- Mary McCarthy -
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When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you. It works, I guarantee you, this sure-fire guilt-eradicator, like a homeopathic medicine - like in small doses applied to like. It works, but I am not sure that it is a good thing.
-- Mary McCarthy -
Europeans used to say Americans were puritanical. Then they discovered that we were not puritans. So now they say that we are obsessed with sex.
-- Mary McCarthy -
When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans.
-- Mary McCarthy -
The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.
-- Mary McCarthy -
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It [Socialism] was a kind of political hockey played by big, gaunt, dyspeptic girls in pants.
-- Mary McCarthy -
In moments of despair, we look on ourselves lead-enly as objects; we see ourselves, our lives, as someone else might see them and may even be driven to kill ourselves if the separation, the "knowledge," seems sufficiently final.
-- Mary McCarthy -
The rationalist mind has always had its doubts about Venice. The watery city receives a dry inspection, as though it were a myth for the credulous- poets and honeymooners.
-- Mary McCarthy -
This grossly advertised wonder [Venice], this gold idol with clay feet, this trompe-l'oeil, this painted deception, this cliche-what intelligent iconoclast could fail to experience a destructive impulse in her presence?
-- Mary McCarthy -
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Venice is the worlds unconscious: a misers glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by a saint who is really a prince who has just slain a dragon.
-- Mary McCarthy -
Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a 'work' of man.
-- Mary McCarthy -
Understanding is often a prelude to forgiveness, but they are not the same, and we often forgive what we cannot understand (seeing nothing else to do) and understand what we cannot pardon.
-- Mary McCarthy -
Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty; it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils.
-- Mary McCarthy -
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I once started a detective story to make money—but I couldn't get the murder to take place! At the end of three chapters I was still describing the characters and the milieu, so I thought, this is not going to work. No corpse!
-- Mary McCarthy -
What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake. If you're interested in the cake, you get rather annoyed with people saying what species the real plum was.
-- Mary McCarthy -
You know what my favourite quotation is?...It's from Chaucer... Criseyde says it, "I am myne owene woman, wel at ese.
-- Mary McCarthy -
Laughter is the great antidote for self-pity, maybe a specific for the malady, yet probably it does tend to dry one's feelings out a little, as if by exposing them to a vigorous wind ...
-- Mary McCarthy -
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As subjects, we all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story. We cannot believe that it is finished, that we are 'finished,' even though we may say so; we expect another chapter, another installment, tomorrow or next week.
-- Mary McCarthy -
Making love, we are all more alike than we are when we are talking or acting.
-- Mary McCarthy -
Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.
-- Mary McCarthy -
It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.
-- Mary McCarthy -
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All dramatic realism is somewhat sadistic; an audience is persuaded to watch something that makes it uncomfortable and from which no relief is offered - no laughter, no tears, no purgation.
-- Mary McCarthy -
The dictator is also the scapegoat; in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt; and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance.
-- Mary McCarthy -
As soon as you become a writer, you lose contact with ordinary experience or tend to. ... the worst fate of a writer is to become a writer.
-- Mary McCarthy -
The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable.
-- Mary McCarthy -
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Who are the advertising men kidding, besides the European tourist? Between the tired, sad, gentle faces of the subway riders and the grinning Holy Families of the Ad-Mass, there exists no possibility of even a wishful identification.
-- Mary McCarthy -
We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.
-- Mary McCarthy -
... the average Catholic perceives no connection between religion and morality, unless it is a question of someone else's morality.
-- Mary McCarthy -
Combativeness was, I suppose, the dominant trait in my grandmother's nature. An aggressive churchgoer, she was quite without Christian feeling; the mercy of the Lord Jesus had never entered her heart. Her piety was an act of war against Protestant ascendancy. ...The teachings of the Church did not interest her, except as they were a rebuke to others ...
-- Mary McCarthy -
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... it was religion that saved me. Our ugly church and parochial school provided me with my only aesthetic outlet, in the words ofthe Mass and the litanies and the old Latin hymns, in the Easter lilies around the altar, rosaries, ornamented prayer books, votive lamps, holy cards stamped in gold and decorated with flower wreaths and a saint's picture.
-- Mary McCarthy -
Once the state is looked upon as the source of rights, rather than their bound protector, freedom becomes conditional on the pleasure of the state.
-- Mary McCarthy -
Illiteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do.
-- Mary McCarthy -
The relation between life and literature - a final antimony - is one of mutual plagiarism.
-- Mary McCarthy -
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Morality did not keep well; it required stable conditions; it was costly; it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain.
-- Mary McCarthy -
For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.
-- Mary McCarthy -
Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.
-- Mary McCarthy -
love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.
-- Mary McCarthy -
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The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.
-- Mary McCarthy -
The present can try to bury the past, an operation that is most atrocious when it is most successful.
-- Mary McCarthy -
My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.
-- Mary McCarthy -
A politician or political thinker who calls himself a political realist is usually boasting that he sees politics, so to speak, in the raw; he is generally a proclaimed cynic and pessimist who makes it his business to look behind words and fine speeches for the motive. This motive is always low.
-- Mary McCarthy -
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On the wall of our life together hung a gun waiting to be fired in the final act.
-- Mary McCarthy -
From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people...
-- Mary McCarthy -
Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.
-- Mary McCarthy -
The things of this world reveal their essential absurdity when they are put in the Venetian context. In the unreal realm of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly.
-- Mary McCarthy -
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It is impossible, except for theologians, to conceive of a world-wide scandal or a universe-wide scandal; the proof of this is the way people have settled down to living with nuclear fission, radiation poisoning, hydrogen bombs, satellites, and space rockets.
-- Mary McCarthy
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