Mary McCarthy Quotes
Top 77 wise famous quotes and sayings 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.
He was a thoroughly bad hat, then, but that was the kind, of course, that nice women broke their hearts over.
Anybody who has ever tried to rectify an injustice or set a record straight comes to feel that he is going mad.
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.
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.
She decided she wanted a cool, starchy independent life, with ruffles of humor like window curtains.
Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships - someone always wins.
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.
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.
The present can try to bury the past, an operation that is most atrocious when it is most successful.
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.
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.
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.
Morality did not keep well; it required stable conditions; it was costly; it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain.
Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.
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.
Elinor was always firmly convinced of other people's hypocrisy since she could not believe that they noticed less than she did.
In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.
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.
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.
The fact is that gardening, more than most of our other activities except sometimes love-making, confronts us with the inexplicable.
The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers; suspicion is reserved for friends.