Mary McCarthy
Author
1912-06-21
Quotes by Mary McCarthy
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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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We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.
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We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.
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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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We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.
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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.
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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.
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Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a 'work' of man.
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The labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that never finishes, toil that has to be begun again the moment it is completed, toil that is destroyed and consumed by the life process.
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The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.
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Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.
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We are a nation of twenty million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.
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The happy ending is our national belief.
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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.
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America is indeed a revelation, though not quite the one that was planned. Given a clean slate, man, it was hoped, would write the future. Instead, he has written his past.
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Driving a car, you are in danger of killing; walking or standing, of being killed.
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He was deferential, ingratiating, concerned for your pleasure, like a waiter with a tray of French pastry in his hand.
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A beggar woman who stands soliciting in front of Palazzo Strozzi, when offered alms a second time in the same day, absently, by another Florentine, refuses: No. You gave me before.
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If he dropped a pun or a platitude into the conversation, it was just as if he had dropped a plate-there would be a moment of frozen silence, then the talk would go on as before.
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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.
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