Mary McCarthy Quotes (42 Quotes)

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner's visit to 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, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it they expose it in its process rather than of it they expose it in its underwear.

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.

It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence . . .

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.

We are the hero of our own story.

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 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.

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

In violence, we forget who we are.

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

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.

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.

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

People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.

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.

In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency

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

The strongest argument for the unmaterialistic character of American life is ... that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable ... the food we eat, the cramped apartments ... the crowded subways.... American life, in large cities, at any rate, is a perpetual assault of the senses and the nerves it is out of asceticism, out of unworldliness, precisely, that we bear it.

I just know that wherever he is, he knows she's doing well and knows what a powerful impact he had on her and he's proud of her. She feels a strong conviction to carry on, stay sober and work hard in his memory.

I'm not worried about my ring, or my house, even though it's not insured. I just want to get to my daughter's house in Georgia.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The happy ending is our national belief.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing. A truth is something that everybody can be shown to know and to have known, as people say, all along.

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

I kept pouring water over her head.