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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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My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.
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It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing.
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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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Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted. Spicy court-memoirs, the lives of gallant ladies, recollections of an ex-nun, a monk's confession, an atheist's repentance, true-to-life accounts of prostitution and bastardy gave our ancestors a penny peep into the forbidden room.
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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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To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.
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All dramatic realism is somewhat sadistic an audience is persuaded to watch something that makes it uncomfortable and from which no relief is offered - no laughter, no tears, no purgation.
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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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Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.
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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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The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.
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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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Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.
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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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A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.
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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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Understanding is often a prelude to forgiveness, but they are not the same, and we often forgive what we cannot understand (seeing nothing else to do) and understand what we cannot pardon.
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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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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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Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.
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