Mary McCarthy quotes

We are the hero of our own story. (Mary McCarthy)
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. View quote
Mary McCarthy
In violence, we forget who we are. View quote
Mary McCarthy
The happy ending is our national belief. View quote
Mary McCarthy
We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour in other words, we are the hero of our own story. View quote
Mary McCarthy
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. View quote
Mary McCarthy
Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the. View quote
Mary McCarthy
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. View quote
Mary McCarthy
In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons. View quote
Mary McCarthy
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. View quote
Mary McCarthy
People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children. (Mary McCarthy)
The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof. View quote
Mary McCarthy
You musn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex. View quote
Mary McCarthy
Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted. View quote
Mary McCarthy
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. View quote
Mary McCarthy
Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard. View quote
Mary McCarthy
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism. View quote
Mary McCarthy
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. View quote
Mary McCarthy
In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality. View quote
Mary McCarthy
If someone tells you he is going to make a "realistic decision," you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad. View quote
Mary McCarthy
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. (Mary McCarthy)
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. View quote
Mary McCarthy
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. View quote
Mary McCarthy
I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake. View quote
Mary McCarthy
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. View quote
Mary McCarthy