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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.

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
Literature
Talk
Cared
Away
Branch
Art
Branches
Doe
Dinner
Much
Theater
Like
Brother
People
Wealth

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Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.
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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.
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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 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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love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.
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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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Old money is fully as moronic as new money but it has inherited an appearance of cultivation.
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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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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.
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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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What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.
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Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.
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If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil never anticipate it.
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What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?
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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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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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The idea of Macbeth as a conscience-torm ented man is a platitude as false as Macbeth himself. Macbeth has no conscience. His main concern throughout the play is that most selfish of all concerns: to get a good night's sleep.
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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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The horror of Gandhi's murder lies not in the political motives behind it or in its consequences for Indian policy or for the future of non-violence the horror lies simply in the fact that any man could look into the face of this extraordinary person and deliberately pull a trigger.
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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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