Mary McCarthy Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Mary McCarthy quote about:
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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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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