"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."
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Quote collection
Mary McCarthy quotes (page 7 of 7)
136 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything."
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"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 ... you really must make the self. It is absolutely useless to look for it, you won't find it, but it's possible in some sense to make it. I don't mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and choose the self you want."
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"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."
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"I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets."
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"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."
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"For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races."
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"Morality did not keep well; it required stable conditions; it was costly; it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain."
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"Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character."
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"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."
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"...the tourist Venice is Venice."
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"... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Driving a car, you are in danger of killing; walking or standing, of being killed."
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"Scratch a socialist and you find a snob."
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