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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.

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
Men
Modern
Small
Copernicus
Universe
Neurosis
Science
Discoveries
Earth
Showing
Feel
Center
Feels
Began
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Discovery

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We are the hero of our own story.
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America is indeed a revelation, though not quite the one that was planned. Given a clean slate, man, it was hoped, would write the future. Instead, he has written his past.
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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.
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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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The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero.
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What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?
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We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.
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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.
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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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In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.
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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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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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Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.
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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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An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.
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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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It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.
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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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Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.
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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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