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514daad
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What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?
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Mary McCarthy |
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5fa9c20
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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.
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religion
understanding-oneself-and-others
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Mary McCarthy |
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7fda291
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One of the big features of living alone was that you could talk to yourself all you wanted and address imaginary audiences, running the gamut of emotion.
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Mary McCarthy |
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04ade20
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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.
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Mary McCarthy |
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df8089c
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If [she] had come to prefer the company of odd ducks, it was possibly because they had no conception of oddity, or rather, they thought you were odd if you weren't.
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Mary McCarthy |
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a14724c
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I understand what you are feeling," he said. "As Socrates showed, love cannot be anything else but the love of the good. But to find the good is very rare. That is why love is rare, in spite of what people think. It happens to one in a thousand, and to that one it is a revelation. No wonder he cannot communicate with the other nine hundred and ninety-nine."
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Mary McCarthy |
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7e2cdc3
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She decided she wanted a cool, starchy independent life, with ruffles of humor like window curtains.
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Mary McCarthy |
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b0acdde
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This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the 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 ugliness of American decoration, American entertain..
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Mary McCarthy |
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ac41255
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Love had done this to her, for the second time. Love was bad for her. There must be certain people who were allergic to love, and she was one of them. Not only was it bad for her; it made her bad; it poisoned her. Before she knew him, not only had she been far, far happier but she had been nicer. Loving him was turning her into an awful person, a person she hated.
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Mary McCarthy |
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e88423d
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You mustn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex--that's quite a thought, isn't it?
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Mary McCarthy |
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99c3498
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Luckily, I am writing a memoir and not a work of fiction, and therefore I do not have to account for my grandmother's unpleasing character and look for the Oedipal fixation or the traumatic experience which would give her that clinical authenticity that is nowadays so desirable in portraiture.
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Mary McCarthy |
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d79a3c7
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All I knew that night was that I believed in something and couldn't express it, while your team believed in nothing but knew how to say it--in other men's words.
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Mary McCarthy |
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346451f
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I felt caught in a dilemma that was new to me then but which since has become horribly familiar: the trap of adult life, in which you are held, wriggling, powerless to act because you can see both sides. On that occasion, as generally in the future, I compromised.
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Mary McCarthy |
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a7fb4bd
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He was a thoroughly bad hat, then, but that was the kind, of course, that nice women broke their hearts over.
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Mary McCarthy |
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7516f2f
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It came to her that he was going to leave without making love to her. This would mean they had made love for the last time this morning. But that did not count: this morning they did not know it was for the last time. When the door shut behind him, she still could not believe it. "It can't end like this," she said to herself over and over, drumming with her knuckles on her mouth to keep from screaming."
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Mary McCarthy |
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9db34a2
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She felt really quite unequal to the tedious process of reconciliation which, in view of the fact that she was sorry, seemed to her highly unnecessary, like some legal routine or the difficulty of getting passports. Her interest in expiation quickly vanished in the face of its actuality.
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Mary McCarthy |
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ee80135
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He would have been far more attractive to her if she could have trusted him. You could not love a man who was always playing hide-and-seek with you; that was the lesson she had learned.
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Mary McCarthy |
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0ed1385
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His flexible mind extended to take in his opponent's position and then snapped back like an elastic, with the illusion that it had covered ground.
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Mary McCarthy |
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4a5f2bb
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It was the cocktail hour in Priss's room at New York Hospital--terribly gay.
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Mary McCarthy |
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6f9f1dc
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I mean exactly that," Mr. Davison retorted. "You've hit the nail smack on the head. We pay a price for having money. People in my position"--he turned to Kay--"have 'privilege.' That's what I read in the Nation and the New Republic." Mrs. Davison nodded. "Good," said Mr. Davison. "Now listen. The fellow who's got privilege gives up some rights or ought to."
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Mary McCarthy |
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e3227d2
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The group was not afraid of being radical either; they could see the good Roosevelt was doing, despite what Mother and Dad said; they were not taken in by party labels and thought the Democrats should be given a chance to show what they had up their sleeve.
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Mary McCarthy |
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38a8d9a
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He was never quite certain what he thought about anything until he had tested his opinion for seaworthiness in the course of some polemical storm.
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Mary McCarthy |
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3ad644c
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the privacy to make a scene was something she would miss in Utopia ... [N]ow, surrounded by these watchers, she felt deprived of a basic right ... [to] behave badly if necessary, until [Preston] responded to her grief." And"
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Mary McCarthy |
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215847d
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But this poor chap is a dangerous neurotic." Polly laughed. "So you saw that, Father. I never could. He always seemed so normal." "It's the same thing," said her father, putting the groceries away. "All neurotics are petty bourgeois. And vice versa. Madness is too revolutionary for them. They can't go the whole hog. We madmen are the aristocrats of mental illness. You could never marry that fellow, my dear."
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Mary McCarthy |
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73d113b
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The fault, in their view, lay with no single person, but with the middle class composition of the colony, which, feeling itself imperiled, had acted instinctively, as an organism, to extrude the riffraff from its midst.
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Mary McCarthy |
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0e247c8
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They had caught a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, a mirror placed at a turning point where they had expected to see daylight and freedom, and though each of them, individually, was far from believing himself perfect, all had counted on the virtues of others to rescue them themselves.
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Mary McCarthy |
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2393c83
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boredom and urban cynicism had become so natural to them that an experience from which these qualities were absent seemed to be, in some way, defective.
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Mary McCarthy |
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fa76232
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Elinor was always firmly convinced of other people's hypocrisy since she could not believe that they noticed less than she did.
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Mary McCarthy |
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9c5559b
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The Venetians catalogue everything, including themselves. 'These grapes are brown,' I complain to the young vegetable-dealer in Santa Maria Formosa. 'What is wrong with that ? I am brown,' he replies. 'I am the housemaid of the painter Vedova,' says a maid, answering the telephone. 'I am a Jew,' begins a cross-eyed stranger who is next in line in a bookshop. 'Would you care to see the synagogue?' Almost any Venetian, even a child, will aban..
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venice
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Mary McCarthy |
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793c93c
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independent working girls out in the world, in pursuit of the kind of adventure that would strengthen, not deplete, us, as we would then be armed with experience.
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Mary McCarthy |
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88085ba
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Not knaves, fools.
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Mary McCarthy |
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0d99045
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I came back [to school] in the fall, as a full-time boarder, with a certain set to my jaw, determined to go it alone. A summer passed in thoughtful isolation, rowing on a mountain lake, diving from a pier, had made me perfectly reckless. I was going to get myself recognized at whatever price. It was in this cold, empty gambler's mood, common to politicians and adolescents, that I surveyed the convent setup. If I could not win fame by goodne..
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catholic-school
gambling
fame
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Mary McCarthy |
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202b401
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I would have said that Eichmann was profoundly, egregiously stupid, and for me stupidity is not the same as having a low IQ. Here I rather agree with Kant, that stupidity is caused, not by brain failure, but by a wicked heart. Insensitiveness, opacity, inability to make connections, ofter accompanied by low "animal" cunning. One cannot help feeling that this mental oblivion is , by the heart or the moral will--an active preference, and tha..
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Mary McCarthy |
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aba6ff1
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You have to live without love, learn not to need it in order to live with it.
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Mary McCarthy |
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a7fe4a7
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I combine concrete cynicism with a sort of vague optimism.
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Mary McCarthy |
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b907600
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I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.
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Mary McCarthy |
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4f5d977
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Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.
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Mary McCarthy |
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3505cfb
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To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.
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Mary McCarthy |
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fd71057
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A]ll moral values, to the analyst, were just rationalizations: ego massage.
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Mary McCarthy |
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6861f49
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P]ity was very unreliable, as a guide to conduct. It signified a conquered repugnance.
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Mary McCarthy |
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e9829c7
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We are a nation of twenty million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.
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Mary McCarthy |
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3113851
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Life for the European is a career; for the American, it is a hazard.
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Mary McCarthy |
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274af06
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People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.
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Mary McCarthy |
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05eeba6
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Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.
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Mary McCarthy |