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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.

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
Sleep
Platitudes
Idea
Concerns
Night
Throughout
Ideas
Selfish
Play
Main
Good
False
Men
Conscience
Platitude
Concern
Macbeth

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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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love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.
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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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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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Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.
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With extramarital courtship, the deception was prolonged where it had been ephemeral, necessary where it had been frivolous, conspiratorial where it had been lonely.
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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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Driving a car, you are in danger of killing walking or standing, of being killed.
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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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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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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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Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.
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it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.
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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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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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We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.
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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.
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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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If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil never anticipate it.
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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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