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We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour in other words, we are the hero of our own story.
Mary McCarthy
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Mary McCarthy
Age: 77 †
Born: 1912
Born: June 21
Died: 1989
Died: October 25
Author
Autobiographer
Critic
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Seattle
Washington
Mary Therese McCarthy
Life
Suspense
Individuality
Hour
Hero
Story
Words
Stories
Live
More quotes by Mary McCarthy
If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.
Mary McCarthy
Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.
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 suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero.
Mary McCarthy
most people did not care to be taught what they did not already know it made them feel ignorant.
Mary McCarthy
With extramarital courtship, the deception was prolonged where it had been ephemeral, necessary where it had been frivolous, conspiratorial where it had been lonely.
Mary McCarthy
Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.
Mary McCarthy
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.
Mary McCarthy
it came to me, as we sat there, glumly ordering lunch, that for extremely stupid people anti-Semitism was a form of intellectuality, the sole form of intellectuality of which they were capable. It represented, in a rudimentary way, the ability to make categories, to generalize.
Mary McCarthy
For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.
Mary McCarthy
For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by a tornado.
Mary McCarthy
A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.
Mary McCarthy
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.
Mary McCarthy
Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.
Mary McCarthy
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.
Mary McCarthy
Driving a car, you are in danger of killing walking or standing, of being killed.
Mary McCarthy
Life for the European is a career for the American it is a hazard.
Mary McCarthy
Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.
Mary McCarthy
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.
Mary McCarthy
Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.
Mary McCarthy
