Mary McCarthy Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

Mary McCarthy
Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'.
Of Lillian Hellman

Mary McCarthy
Waves of shame ran through her, like savage internal blushes.

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

Mary McCarthy
It's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.

Mary McCarthy
People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.

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

Mary McCarthy
A doubt would suddenly dart out of her, like a mouse from its hole.

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

Mary McCarthy
The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.

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

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

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

Mary McCarthy
She had the brusque, brutal air of a person detailed to cut Gordian knots.

Mary McCarthy
We are a nation of twenty million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mary McCarthy
The relation between life and literature — a final antimony — is one of mutual plagiarism.

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

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

Mary McCarthy
A wholly materialistic city is nothing but a dream incarnate. Venice is the world's unconscious.

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

Mary McCarthy
Love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.

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

Mary McCarthy
A good deal of education consists in un-learning—the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.

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

Mary McCarthy