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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.

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
Though
Planned
Men
Revelation
Future
Revelations
Write
Indeed
Given
Clean
Past
Instead
America
Quite
Slate
Writing
Written
Hoped
Would

More quotes by Mary McCarthy

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Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.
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The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.
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I shall never send for a priest or recite an Act of Contrition in my last moments. I do not mind if I lose my soul for all eternity. If the kind of God exists Who would damn me for not working out a deal with Him, then that is unfortunate. I should not care to spend eternity in the company of such a person.
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...the tourist Venice is Venice.
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It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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In violence, we forget who we are
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Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.
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The happy ending is our national belief.
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most people did not care to be taught what they did not already know it made them feel ignorant.
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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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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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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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A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.
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My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.
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Venice is the worlds unconscious: a misers glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by a saint who is really a prince who has just slain a dragon.
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