"Maybe any action becomes cowardly once you stop to reason about it."
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Quote collection
Mary McCarthy quotes (page 6 of 7)
136 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"On the wall of our life together hung a gun waiting to be fired in the final act."
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"The fact is that gardening, more than most of our other activities except sometimes love-making, confronts us with the inexplicable."
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"The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable."
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"We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub."
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"The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers; suspicion is reserved for friends."
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"Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable."
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"Any sizeable Portuguese town looks like a superstitious bride's finery - something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue."
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"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."
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"The perennial wonder of Venice is to peer at herself in her canals and find that she exists-incredible as it seems. It is the same reassurance that a looking-glass offers us: the guarantee that we are real."
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"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?"
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"It really seems to me sometimes that the only hope is space. That is to say, perhaps the most energeticin a bad senseelements will move on to a new world in space. The problems of mass society will be transported into space, leaving behind this world as a kind of Europe, which then eventually tourists will visit. The Old World. I'm only half joking."
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"I once started a detective story to make moneybut I couldn't get the murder to take place! At the end of three chapters I was still describing the characters and the milieu, so I thought, this is not going to work. No corpse!"
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"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."
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"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."
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"What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake. If you're interested in the cake, you get rather annoyed with people saying what species the real plum was."
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"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."
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"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."
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"A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget."
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