Mary McCarthy Quotes

We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.

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.

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

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.

Every word she writes is a lie, including "and" and "the."

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

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

If someone tells you he is going to make a 'realistic decision', you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.

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.

We are the hero of our own story.

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

In violence, we forget who we are

most people did not care to be taught what they did not already know; it made them feel ignorant.

You know what my favourite quotation is?.. It's from Chaucer... Criseyde says it, "I am myne owene woman, wel at ese."

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

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.

The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero.

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

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

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

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.

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.

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.

Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.

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

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

Venice is the worlds unconscious: a misers glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by a saint who is really a prince who has just slain a dragon.

For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by a tornado.

There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.

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.

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.

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

The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof

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

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.

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

Our language, once homely and colloquial, seeks to aggrandize our meanest activities with polysyllabic terms or it retreats from frankness into a stammering verbosity.

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

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.

it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.

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

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.

If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil; never anticipate it.

The happy ending is our national belief.

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

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

... 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.

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.

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 - how to express this - you really must make the self.

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