Leisure was the sine qua non of the full Renaissance. The feudal nobility, having lost its martial function, sought diversion all over… — Mary McCarthy Art Copy Share Image
As soon as you become a writer, you lose contact with ordinary experience or tend to. ... the worst fate of a… — Mary McCarthy Contact Copy Share Image
In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons. — Mary McCarthy Ethical Copy Share Image
To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate. — Mary McCarthy Fate Copy Share Image
The comic element is the incorrigible element in every human being; the capacity to learn, from experience or instruction, is what is… — Mary McCarthy Capacity Copy Share Image
The perennial wonder of Venice is to peer at herself in her canals and find that she exists-incredible as it seems. It… — Mary McCarthy Canals Copy Share Image
love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel. — Mary McCarthy Books Copy Share Image
If someone tells you he is going to make a ealistic decision, you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something… — Mary McCarthy Decision making Copy Share Image
Every word she writes is a lie, including "and" and "the." — Mary McCarthy Including Copy Share Image
Anybody who has ever tried to rectify an injustice or set a record straight comes to feel that he is going mad. — Mary McCarthy Feels Copy Share Image
You know what my favourite quotation is?.. It's from Chaucer... Criseyde says it, "I am myne owene woman, wel at ese." — Mary McCarthy Chaucer Copy Share Image
When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materialistic people I have… — Mary McCarthy Crosses Copy Share Image
The present can try to bury the past, an operation that is most atrocious when it is most successful. — Mary McCarthy Operations Copy Share Image
The fact is that gardening, more than most of our other activities except sometimes love-making, confronts us with the inexplicable. — Mary McCarthy Activity Copy Share Image
The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner's visit to… — Mary McCarthy Things happen for a reason Copy Share Image
Maybe any action becomes cowardly once you stop to reason about it. — Mary McCarthy Action Copy Share Image
I shall never send for a priest or recite an Act of Contrition in my last moments. I do not mind if… — Mary McCarthy Care Copy Share Image
For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races. — Mary McCarthy Affair Copy Share Image
As subjects, we all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero… — Mary McCarthy Believe 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 Absence Copy Share Image
In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but… — Mary McCarthy Absence Copy Share Image
Old money is fully as moronic as new money but it has inherited an appearance of cultivation. — Mary McCarthy Appearance Copy Share Image
Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or… — Mary McCarthy Action Copy Share Image
