The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of… — Mary McCarthy Copy Share Image
If you talked or laughed in church, told lies, had impure thoughts or conversations, you were bad; if you obeyed your parents… — Mary McCarthy Copy Share Image
The strongest argument for the unmaterialistic character of American life is . . . that we tolerate conditions that are, from a… — Mary McCarthy Copy Share Image
The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at… — Mary McCarthy Copy Share Image
The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is the fact that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic… — Mary McCarthy Copy Share Image
Others are to us like the characters in fiction, eternal and incorrigible; the surprises they give us turn out in the end… — Mary McCarthy Copy Share Image
I once started a detective story to make moneybut I couldn't get the murder to take place! At the end of three… — Mary McCarthy Copy Share Image
Morality did not keep well; it required stable conditions; it was costly; it was subject to variations, and the market for it… — Mary McCarthy Copy Share Image
Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character. — Mary McCarthy Copy Share Image
To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause… — Mary McCarthy Copy Share Image
From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people. — Mary McCarthy Copy Share Image
Yet friendship, I believe, is essential to intellectuals. It is probably the growth hormone the mind requires as it begins its activity of producing… — Mary McCarthy Copy Share Image
Any sizeable Portuguese town looks like a superstitious bride's finery - something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. — Mary McCarthy Copy Share Image
The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers; suspicion is reserved for friends. — Mary McCarthy Copy Share Image
“She considered [her] life, which had not been a life but only a sort of greeting, a Hello There.” — Mary McCarthy Copy Share Image
America is indeed a revelation, though not quite the one that was planned. Given a clean slate, man, it was hoped, would write the… — Mary McCarthy Copy Share Image
Making love, we are all more alike than we are when we are talking or acting. — Mary McCarthy Copy Share Image
... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending… — Mary McCarthy Copy Share Image
The only form of action open to a child is to break something or strike someone, its mother or another child; it cannot cause… — Mary McCarthy Copy Share Image
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… — Mary McCarthy Copy Share Image
