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An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.

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
Terrible
Cases
Question
Restlessly
Justice
Lingering
Social
Unfinished
Way
Atmosphere
Like
Injustice
Case

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A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.
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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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People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.
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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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A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.
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It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.
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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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The breakdown of our language, evident in the misuse, i.e., the misunderstanding of nouns and adjectives, is most grave, though perhaps not so conspicuous, in the handling of prepositions, those modest little connectives that hold the parts of a phrase or a sentence together. They are the joints of any language, what make it, literally, articulate.
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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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Life for the European is a career for the American it is a hazard.
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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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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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love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.
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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.
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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.
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it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.
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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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My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.
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The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth like canasta, it does away with the brother of talk after dinner.
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For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.
Mary McCarthy