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

More quotes by Mary McCarthy

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The rationalist mind has always had its doubts about Venice. The watery city receives a dry inspection, as though it were a myth for the credulous- poets and honeymooners.
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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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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.
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Venice is the worlds unconscious: a misers glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by a saint who is really a prince who has just slain a dragon.
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Life for the European is a career for the American it is a hazard.
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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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I shall never send for a priest or recite an Act of Contrition in my last moments. I do not mind if I lose my soul for all eternity. If the kind of God exists Who would damn me for not working out a deal with Him, then that is unfortunate. I should not care to spend eternity in the company of such a person.
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The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.
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The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers suspicion is reserved for friends.
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Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.
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To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.
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A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.
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People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.
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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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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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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.
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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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love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.
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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.
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