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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
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Oneself
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Really
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Always
Differences
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More quotes by 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
Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.
Mary McCarthy
To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.
Mary McCarthy
What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?
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
Once the state is looked upon as the source of rights, rather than their bound protector, freedom becomes conditional on the pleasure of the state.
Mary McCarthy
The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers suspicion is reserved for friends.
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 - how to express this - you really must make the self.
Mary McCarthy
What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.
Mary McCarthy
The horror of Gandhi's murder lies not in the political motives behind it or in its consequences for Indian policy or for the future of non-violence the horror lies simply in the fact that any man could look into the face of this extraordinary person and deliberately pull a trigger.
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
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.
Mary McCarthy
My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.
Mary McCarthy
The dictator is also the scapegoat in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance.
Mary McCarthy
In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.
Mary McCarthy
Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships - someone always wins.
Mary McCarthy
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
A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.
Mary McCarthy
Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.
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