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

More quotes by Mary McCarthy

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From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people.
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Modern neurosis began with the discoveries of Copernicus. Science made men feel small by showing him that the earth was not the center of the universe.
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In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.
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love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.
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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.
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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
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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.
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it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.
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The idea of Macbeth as a conscience-torm ented man is a platitude as false as Macbeth himself. Macbeth has no conscience. His main concern throughout the play is that most selfish of all concerns: to get a good night's sleep.
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It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.
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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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Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.
Mary McCarthy
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The return to a favorite novel is generally tied up with changes in oneself that must be counted as improvements, but have the feel of losses. It is like going back to a favorite house, country, person nothing is where it belongs, including one's heart.
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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.
Mary McCarthy
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The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.
Mary McCarthy
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...the tourist Venice is Venice.
Mary McCarthy
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Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.
Mary McCarthy
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Morality did not keep well it required stable conditions it was costly it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain.
Mary McCarthy
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What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?
Mary McCarthy
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It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing.
Mary McCarthy