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If someone tells you he is going to make a 'realistic decision', you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.

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
Decision
Understand
Someone
Going
Something
Resolved
Make
Realistic
Immediately
Tells

More quotes by Mary McCarthy

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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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For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.
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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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A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.
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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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In moments of despair, we look on ourselves lead-enly as objects we see ourselves, our lives, as someone else might see them and may even be driven to kill ourselves if the separation, the knowledge, seems sufficiently final.
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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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To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.
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it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.
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In violence, we forget who we are
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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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A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.
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Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships - someone always wins.
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What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.
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Driving a car, you are in danger of killing walking or standing, of being killed.
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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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Leisure was the sine qua non of the full Renaissance. The feudal nobility, having lost its martial function, sought diversion all over Europe in cultivated pastimes: sonneteering, the lute, games and acrostics, travel, gentlemanly studies and sports, hunting and hawking, treated as arts.
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Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.
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.
Mary McCarthy
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...the tourist Venice is Venice.
Mary McCarthy