Mary McCarthy quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Mary McCarthy

Mary McCarthy Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Mary McCarthy on Wise Famous Quotes.

There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.

The average Catholic perceives no connection between religion and morality, unless it is a question of someone else's morality.

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.

Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'."
(on Lillian Hellman)

He was a thoroughly bad hat, then, but that was the kind, of course, that nice women broke their hearts over.

You musn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.

Anybody who has ever tried to rectify an injustice or set a record straight comes to feel that he is going mad.

It [Socialism] was a kind of political hockey played by big, gaunt, dyspeptic girls in pants.

In morals as in politics anarchy is not for the weak.

Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.

I am for the ones who represent sense, and so was Jane Austen.

Maybe any action becomes cowardly once you stop to reason about it.

People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.

Be truthful ... and pay attention. I would also recommend the avoidance of credit cards.

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 after dinner.

Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty; it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils.

Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.

If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.

Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.

What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?

She decided she wanted a cool, starchy independent life, with ruffles of humor like window curtains.

We are the hero of our own story.

Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships - someone always wins.

She considered [her] life, which had not been a life but only a sort of greeting, a Hello There.

His flexible mind extended to take in his opponent's position and then snapped back like an elastic, with the illusion that it had covered ground.

It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.

For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.

From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people ...

If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil; never anticipate it.

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.

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.

In violence we forget who we are.

The present can try to bury the past, an operation that is most atrocious when it is most successful.

A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.

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.

Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.

Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.

A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.

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.

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.

You mustn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex - that's quite a thought, isn't it?

Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.

We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.

Morality did not keep well; it required stable conditions; it was costly; it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain.

On the wall of our life together hung a gun waiting to be fired in the final act.

To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.

In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.

Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.

Love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.

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.

He was never quite certain what he thought about anything until he had tested his opinion for seaworthiness in the course of some polemical storm.

You know what my favourite quotation is? ... It's from Chaucer ... Criseyde says it, I am myne owene woman, wel at ese.

Most people did not care to be taught what they did not already know; it made them feel ignorant.

Elinor was always firmly convinced of other people's hypocrisy since she could not believe that they noticed less than she did.

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.

In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.

Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.

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.

For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

The tourist Venice is Venice.

If someone tells you he is going to make a 'realistic decision', you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.

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.

Driving a car, you are in danger of killing; walking or standing, of being killed.

The relation between life and literature - a final antimony - is one of mutual plagiarism.

My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.

Making love, we are all more alike than we are when we are talking or acting.

We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words you are the hero of your own story.

The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.

Old money is fully as moronic as new money but it has inherited an appearance of cultivation.

The fact is that gardening, more than most of our other activities except sometimes love-making, confronts us with the inexplicable.

Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard.

The happy ending is our national belief.

The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers; suspicion is reserved for friends.

An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.

She rarely showed her emotions, which appeared to have been burned out by the continual short-circuiting of her attention.