Mary McCarthy Quotes

88 quotes in 1307 categories

• In violence, we forget who we are
• A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.
• In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands…
• The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a…
• Others are to us like the characters in fiction, eternal and incorrigible; the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been…
• Modern neurosis began with the discoveries of Copernicus. Science made men feel small by showing him that the earth was not the center of the…
• The happy ending is our national belief.
• Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.
• Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual…
• An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.
• Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard.
• To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth…
• People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.
• The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and…
• Every word she writes is a lie, including "and" and "the."
• Anti-Semitism is a horrible disease from which nobody is immune, and it has a kind of evil fascination that makes an enlightened person draw near…
• You mustn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.
• I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that ...…
• If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.
• The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the brother of talk…

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