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Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.

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
Conscious
Side
Sides
Literature
Makes
Imitative
Human
Apes
Humans
Abroad
Whole
Behavior

More quotes by Mary McCarthy

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The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers suspicion is reserved for friends.
Mary McCarthy
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What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.
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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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A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.
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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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If someone tells you he is going to make a 'realistic decision', you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.
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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.
Mary McCarthy
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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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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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Driving a car, you are in danger of killing walking or standing, of being killed.
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... the average Catholic perceives no connection between religion and morality, unless it is a question of someone else's morality.
Mary McCarthy
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The rationalist mind has always had its doubts about Venice. The watery city receives a dry inspection, as though it were a myth for the credulous- poets and honeymooners.
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Others are to us like the characters in fiction, eternal and incorrigible the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been predictable and unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves.
Mary McCarthy
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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.
Mary McCarthy
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most people did not care to be taught what they did not already know it made them feel ignorant.
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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I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets.
Mary McCarthy
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We are the hero of our own story.
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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The things of this world reveal their essential absurdity when they are put in the Venetian context. In the unreal realm of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly.
Mary McCarthy