Mary Mccarthy Quotes

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

The horror of Gandhi's murder lies not in the political motives behind it or in its consequences for Indian policy or for the future of non-violence; the horror lies simply in the fact that any man could look into the face of this extraordinary person and deliberately pull a trigger. ~ Mary McCarthy

The happy ending is our national belief. ~ Mary McCarthy

You have to live without love, learn not to need it in order to live with it. ~ Mary McCarthy

The dictator is also the scapegoat; in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt; and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance. ~ Mary McCarthy

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 bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around. ~ Mary McCarthy

The famous Florentine elegance, which attracts tourists to the shops on Via Tornabuoni and Via della Vigna Nuova, is characterized by austerity of line, simplicity, economy of effect. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

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

All I knew that night was that I believed in something and couldn't express it, while your team believed in nothing but knew how to say it - in other men's words. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

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

Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret. ~ Mary McCarthy

Leisure was the sine qua non of the full Renaissance. The feudal nobility, having lost its martial function, sought diversion all over Europe in cultivated pastimes: sonneteering, the lute, games and acrostics, travel, gentlemanly studies and sports, hunting and hawking, treated as arts. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

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

Who are the advertising men kidding, besides the European tourist? Between the tired, sad, gentle faces of the subway riders and the grinning Holy Families of the Ad-Mass, there exists no possibility of even a wishful identification. ~ Mary McCarthy

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 predictable and unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

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

Love had done this to her, for the second time. Love was bad for her. There must be certain people who were allergic to love, and she was one of them. Not only was it bad for her; it made her bad; it poisoned her. Before she knew him, not only had she been far, far happier but she had been nicer. Loving him was turning her into an awful person, a person she hated. ~ Mary McCarthy

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. ~ Mary McCarthy

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 the source of infection, supposedly in a scientific spirit, but really to sniff the vapors and dally with the possibility. ~ Mary McCarthy

When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans. ~ Mary McCarthy

All dramatic realism is somewhat sadistic; an audience is persuaded to watch something that makes it uncomfortable and from which no relief is offered - no laughter, no tears, no purgation. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

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

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

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

People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children. ~ Mary McCarthy

The fault, in their view, lay with no single person, but with the middle class composition of the colony, which, feeling itself imperiled, had acted instinctively, as an organism, to extrude the riffraff from its midst. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

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

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

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. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

In violence we forget who we are. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

We are the hero of our own story. ~ Mary McCarthy

This is the spirit of the enchantment under which Venice lies, pearly and roseate, like the Sleeping Beauty, changeless throughout the centuries, arrested, while the concrete forest of the modern world grows up around her. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

The erotic element always present in fashion, the kiss of loving labor on the body, is now overtly expressed by language. Belts hug or clasp; necklines plunge; jerseys bind. The word exciting tingles everywhere. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake. ~ Mary McCarthy

This grossly advertised wonder [Venice], this gold idol with clay feet, this trompe-l'oeil, this painted deception, this cliche-what intelligent iconoclast could fail to experience a destructive impulse in her presence? ~ Mary McCarthy

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 by the state pending good behavior. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

The exile is a singular, whereas refugees tend to be thought of in the mass ... What is implied in these nuances of social standing is the respect we pay to choice. The exile appears to have made a decision, while the refugee is the very image of helplessness. ~ Mary McCarthy

If you talked or laughed in church, told lies, had impure thoughts or conversations, you were bad; if you obeyed your parents or guardians, went to confession and communion regularly, said prayers for the dead, you were good. ~ Mary McCarthy

The idea of Macbeth as a conscience-torm ented man is a platitude as false as Macbeth himself. Macbeth has no conscience. His main concern throughout the play is that most selfish of all concerns: to get a good night's sleep. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

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

All ideas advanced to deal with the Florentine noise problem, the Florentine traffic problem, are Utopian, and nobody believes in them, just as nobody believed in Machiavelli's Prince, a Utopian image of the ideally self-interested despot. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

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

The comic element is the incorrigible element in every human being; the capacity to learn, from experience or instruction, is what is forbidden to all comic creations and to what is comic in you and me. ~ Mary McCarthy

With extramarital courtship, the deception was prolonged where it had been ephemeral, necessary where it had been frivolous, conspiratorial where it had been lonely. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

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 of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

Like Michelangelo and Cellini, Florentines of every station are absorbed in acquiring real estate: a little apartment that can be rented to foreigners; a farm that will supply the owner with oil, wine, fruit, and flowers for the house. ~ Mary McCarthy

Laughter is the great antidote for self-pity, maybe a specific for the malady, yet probably it does tend to dry one's feelings out a little, as if by exposing them to a vigorous wind ... ~ Mary McCarthy

Among the people, it was believed, as late as the present century, that spirits were imprisoned in statues. The statue of Neptune by Ammanati in the fountain of the Piazza della Signoria is called 'Il Biancone' or 'The Great White Man' by the poor people, who used to say that he was the mighty river god of the Arno tuned into statue because, like Michelangelo, he spurned the love of women. When the full moon shines on him, so the story goes, he comes to life and walks about the Piazza conversing with the other statues. Michelangelo's 'David', before it became a statue, used to be known as 'The Giant'. It was a great block of marble eighteen feet high that had been spoiled by Agostino di Duccio; personified by popular fancy, it lay for forty years in the workshops of the Cathedral, until Michelangelo made the Giant-Killer, that is, into a patriotic image of a small country defeating its larger foes. Giants, it was related, had built the great Etruscan stone wall of Fiesole, and many stories were told in Florence of beautiful maidens being turned into pure white marble statues. ~ Mary MacCarthy

If [she] had come to prefer the company of odd ducks, it was possibly because they had no conception of oddity, or rather, they thought you were odd if you weren't. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

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. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

A politician or political thinker who calls himself a political realist is usually boasting that he sees politics, so to speak, in the raw; he is generally a proclaimed cynic and pessimist who makes it his business to look behind words and fine speeches for the motive. This motive is always low. ~ Mary McCarthy

I mean exactly that," Mr. Davison retorted. "You've hit the nail smack on the head. We pay a price for having money. People in my position" - he turned to Kay - "have 'privilege.' That's what I read in the Nation and the New Republic." Mrs. Davison nodded. "Good," said Mr. Davison. "Now listen. The fellow who's got privilege gives up some rights or ought to. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world. ~ Mary McCarthy

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 greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air. ~ Mary McCarthy

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. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

They had caught a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, a mirror placed at a turning point where they had expected to see daylight and freedom, and though each of them, individually, was far from believing himself perfect, all had counted on the virtues of others to rescue them themselves. ~ Mary McCarthy

In moments of despair, we look on ourselves lead-enly as objects; we see ourselves, our lives, as someone else might see them and may even be driven to kill ourselves if the separation, the "knowledge," seems sufficiently final. ~ Mary McCarthy

Ah, God, it was too sad and awful, the endless hide-and-go-seek game one played with the middle class.
If one could only be sure that one did not belong to it, that
one was finer, nobler, more aristocratic. The truth was, she
hated it shakily from above, not solidly from below, and her
proletarian sympathies constituted a sort of snub that she ad-
ministered to the middle class, just as a really smart woman will
outdress her friends by relentlessly underdressing them. Scratch
a socialist and you find a snob. The semantic test confirmed
this. In the Marxist language, your opponent was always a
"parvenu," an "upstart," an "adventurer," a politician was al-
ways "cheap," and an opportunist "vulgar." But the proletariat
did not talk in such terms; this was the tone of the F.F.V.
What the socialist movement did for a man was to allow him-
self the airs of a marquis without having either his title or his 
sanity questioned. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

The only form of action open to a child is to break something or strike someone, its mother or another child; it cannot cause things to happen in the world. ~ Mary McCarthy

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. ~ Mary McCarthy

The group was not afraid of being radical either; they could see the good Roosevelt was doing, despite what Mother and Dad said; they were not taken in by party labels and thought the Democrats should be given a chance to show what they had up their sleeve. ~ Mary McCarthy

Congress-these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage. ~ Mary McCarthy

I would have said that Eichmann was profoundly, egregiously stupid, and for me stupidity is not the same as having a low IQ. Here I rather agree with Kant, that stupidity is caused, not by brain failure, but by a wicked heart. Insensitiveness, opacity, inability to make connections, ofter accompanied by low "animal" cunning. One cannot help feeling that this mental oblivion is chosen, by the heart or the moral will--an active preference, and that explains why one is so irritated by stupidity, which is not the case when one is dealing with a truly backward individual. ~ Mary McCarthy

One of the big features of living alone was that you could talk to yourself all you wanted and address imaginary audiences, running the gamut of emotion. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

Understanding is often a prelude to forgiveness, but they are not the same, and we often forgive what we cannot understand (seeing nothing else to do) and understand what we cannot pardon. ~ Mary McCarthy

Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

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

It came to me, as we sat there, glumly ordering lunch, that for extremely stupid people anti-Semitism was a form of intellectuality, the sole form of intellectuality of which they were capable. It represented, in a rudimentary way, the ability to make categories, to generalize. ~ Mary McCarthy

I shall never send for a priest or recite an Act of Contrition in my last moments. I do not mind if I lose my soul for all eternity. If the kind of God exists Who would damn me for not working out a deal with Him, then that is unfortunate. I should not care to spend eternity in the company of such a person. ~ Mary McCarthy

I understand what you are feeling," he said. "As Socrates showed, love cannot be anything else but the love of the good. But to find the good is very rare. That is why love is rare, in spite of what people think. It happens to one in a thousand, and to that one it is a revelation. No wonder he cannot communicate with the other nine hundred and ninety-nine. ~ Mary McCarthy

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

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 universe. ~ Mary McCarthy

As subjects, we all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story. We cannot believe that it is finished, that we are 'finished,' even though we may say so; we expect another chapter, another installment, tomorrow or next week. ~ Mary McCarthy

Luckily, I am writing a memoir and not a work of fiction, and therefore I do not have to account for my grandmother's unpleasing character and look for the Oedipal fixation or the traumatic experience which would give her that clinical authenticity that is nowadays so desirable in portraiture. ~ Mary McCarthy

The return to a favorite novel is generally tied up with changes in oneself that must be counted as improvements, but have the feel of losses. It is like going back to a favorite house, country, person; nothing is where it belongs, including one's heart. ~ Mary McCarthy

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