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Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.

Mary McCarthy

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Mary McCarthy
Age: 77 †
Born: 1912
Born: June 21
Died: 1989
Died: October 25
Author
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Journalist
Literary Critic
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Writer
Seattle
Washington
Mary Therese McCarthy
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Freedom
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More quotes by Mary McCarthy

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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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Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.
Mary McCarthy
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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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If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.
Mary McCarthy
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For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.
Mary McCarthy
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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.
Mary McCarthy
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What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.
Mary McCarthy
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We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.
Mary McCarthy
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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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love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.
Mary McCarthy
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For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.
Mary McCarthy
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In violence, we forget who we are
Mary McCarthy
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this is the spirit of the enchantment under which Venice lies, pearly and roseate, like the Sleeping Beauty, changeless throughout the centuries, arrested, while the concrete forest of the modern world grows up around her.
Mary McCarthy
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Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils.
Mary McCarthy
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My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.
Mary McCarthy
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There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.
Mary McCarthy
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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.
Mary McCarthy
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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.
Mary McCarthy
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Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.
Mary McCarthy
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Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.
Mary McCarthy