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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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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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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.
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Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.
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Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.
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The erotic element always present in fashion, the kiss of loving labor on the body, is now overtly expressed by language. Belts hug or clasp necklines plunge jerseys bind. The word exciting tingles everywhere.
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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.
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It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.
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it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.
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The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.
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Like Michelangelo and Cellini, Florentines of every station are absorbed in acquiring real estate: a little apartment that can be rented to foreigners a farm that will supply the owner with oil, wine, fruit, and flowers for the house.
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Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.
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I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets.
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Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.
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... the average Catholic perceives no connection between religion and morality, unless it is a question of someone else's morality.
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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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Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted. Spicy court-memoirs, the lives of gallant ladies, recollections of an ex-nun, a monk's confession, an atheist's repentance, true-to-life accounts of prostitution and bastardy gave our ancestors a penny peep into the forbidden room.
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We are the hero of our own story.
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What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.
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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 both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.
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