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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.

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
Feels
Express
Really
Older
Make
Interested
Think
Literature
Thinking
Everyone
Quests
Self
Quest
Feel
Continues
Must
Suppose

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Morality did not keep well it required stable conditions it was costly it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain.
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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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America is indeed a revelation, though not quite the one that was planned. Given a clean slate, man, it was hoped, would write the future. Instead, he has written his past.
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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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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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...the tourist Venice is Venice.
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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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For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.
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In violence, we forget who we are
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We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.
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Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.
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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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it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.
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The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero.
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People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.
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A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.
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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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The erotic element always present in fashion, the kiss of loving labor on the body, is now overtly expressed by language. Belts hug or clasp necklines plunge jerseys bind. The word exciting tingles everywhere.
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The dictator is also the scapegoat in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance.
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From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people.
Mary McCarthy