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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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People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.
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For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.
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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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Life for the European is a career for the American it is a hazard.
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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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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.
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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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A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.
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For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.
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A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.
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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.
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Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.
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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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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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love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.
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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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it came to me, as we sat there, glumly ordering lunch, that for extremely stupid people anti-Semitism was a form of intellectuality, the sole form of intellectuality of which they were capable. It represented, in a rudimentary way, the ability to make categories, to generalize.
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The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers suspicion is reserved for friends.
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We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour in other words, we are the hero of our own story.
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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.
Mary McCarthy