Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by a tornado.
Mary McCarthy
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Mark
Nonchalance
Moved
Tornado
Fact
Tornadoes
Individual
Deposits
History
Trend
House
Historic
Facts
Trends
Like
Picks
Playfully
More quotes by Mary McCarthy
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.
Mary McCarthy
Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.
Mary McCarthy
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.
Mary McCarthy
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
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
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.
Mary McCarthy
...the tourist Venice is Venice.
Mary McCarthy
In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.
Mary McCarthy
love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.
Mary McCarthy
Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.
Mary McCarthy
An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.
Mary McCarthy
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
If someone tells you he is going to make a 'realistic decision', you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.
Mary McCarthy
To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.
Mary McCarthy
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
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
Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils.
Mary McCarthy
The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.
Mary McCarthy
For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.
Mary McCarthy
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.
Mary McCarthy
