Mary McCarthy Quotations

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.

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

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.

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 all too much a professional air.

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

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

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

We are the hero of our own story.

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

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

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

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.

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.

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

People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Our mission is to provide legal services to impoverished individuals, and advance the rights and protections of the immigrant population.

... it was religion that saved me. Our ugly church and parochial school provided me with my only aesthetic outlet, in the words ofthe Mass and the litanies and the old Latin hymns, in the Easter lilies around the altar, rosaries, ornamented prayer books, votive lamps, holy cards stamped in gold and decorated with flower wreaths and a saint's picture.

Old money is fully as moronic as new money but it has inherited an appearance of cultivation.

The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is the fact that we tolerate conditions that are, from a negative point of view, intolerable. What the foreigner finds most objectionable in American life is its lack of basic comfort. No nation with any sense of material well-being would endure the food we eat, the cramped apartments we live in, the noise, the traffic, the crowded subways and buses. American life, in large cities, is a perpetual assault on the senses and the nerves; it is out of asceticism, out of unworldliness, precisely, that we bear it.

We will need much better intelligence on this facility before we seriously consider any options.

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.

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.

They're looking for a place to hide because they're so cold. It could be a pile of anything.

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

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.

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

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

The idea of Macbeth as a conscience-torm ented man is a platitude as false as Macbeth himself. Macbeth has no conscience. His main concern throughout the play is that most selfish of all concerns: to get a good night's sleep.

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

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

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.

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

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

In violence, we forget who we are

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

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.

I am for the ones who represent sense, and so was Jane Austen.

Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.

To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.

A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.

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.

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

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.

The exile is a singular, whereas refugees tend to be thought of in the mass ... What is implied in these nuances of social standing is the respect we pay to choice. The exile appears to have made a decision, while the refugee is the very image of helplessness.

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.

If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.

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.

What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?

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.

Others are to us like the characters in fiction, eternal and incorrigible; the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been predictable and unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves.

The happy ending is our national belief.

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

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?

The things of this world reveal their essential absurdity when they are put in the Venetian context. In the unreal realm of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly.

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.

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

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 possibility.

The fact is that gardening, more than most of our other activities except sometimes love-making, confronts us with the inexplicable.

The furniture and trappings in the apartment are all in a state of flux - here today, gone tomorrow. Nothing is anchored to its place, not even the coffee-pot, which floats off and returns, on the tide of the signora's marine nature.

... 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.

this is the spirit of the enchantment under which Venice lies, pearly and roseate, like the Sleeping Beauty, changeless throughout the centuries, arrested, while the concrete forest of the modern world grows up around her.

Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.

The breakdown of our language, evident in the misuse, i.e., the misunderstanding of nouns and adjectives, is most grave, though perhaps not so conspicuous, in the handling of prepositions, those modest little connectives that hold the parts of a phrase or a sentence together. They are the joints of any language, what make it, literally, articulate.

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

Yet friendship, I believe, is essential to intellectuals. It is probably the growth hormone the mind requires as it begins its activity of producing and exchanging ideas. 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. In the course of my history, not love or marriage so much as friendship has promoted growth.

...the tourist Venice is Venice.

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.

Maybe any action becomes cowardly once you stop to reason about it.

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

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

Any sizeable Portuguese town looks like a superstitious bride's finery - something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.

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

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

The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers; suspicion is reserved for friends.

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 ...

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.

Combativeness was, I suppose, the dominant trait in my grandmother's nature. An aggressive churchgoer, she was quite without Christian feeling; the mercy of the Lord Jesus had never entered her heart. Her piety was an act of war against Protestant ascendancy. ...The teachings of the Church did not interest her, except as they were a rebuke to others ...

Who are the advertising men kidding, besides the European tourist? Between the tired, sad, gentle faces of the subway riders and the grinning Holy Families of the Ad-Mass, there exists no possibility of even a wishful identification.

The dictator is also the scapegoat; in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt; and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance.

All dramatic realism is somewhat sadistic; an audience is persuaded to watch something that makes it uncomfortable and from which no relief is offered - no laughter, no tears, no purgation.

It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.

Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.

Making love, we are all more alike than we are when we are talking or acting.

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.

Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.

On the wall of our life together hung a gun waiting to be fired in the final act.

A politician or political thinker who calls himself a political realist is usually boasting that he sees politics, so to speak, in the raw; he is generally a proclaimed cynic and pessimist who makes it his business to look behind words and fine speeches for the motive. This motive is always low.

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

The present can try to bury the past, an operation that is most atrocious when it is most successful.