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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.

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
Lying
Forced
Understand
Avoid
Reality
Seemed
Thought
Oneself
Something
Tried
Really
Difference
Always
Differences
Things
Vision

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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.
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In violence, we forget who we are
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If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil never anticipate it.
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The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable.
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If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.
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Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.
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Old money is fully as moronic as new money but it has inherited an appearance of cultivation.
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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.
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People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.
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The happy ending is our national belief.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.
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Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.
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Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.
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For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.
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Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.
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