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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.

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
Prolonged
Courtship
Ephemeral
Frivolous
Deception
Lonely
Necessary
Conspiratorial

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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.
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From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people.
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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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If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil never anticipate it.
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Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.
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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.
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Life for the European is a career for the American it is a hazard.
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Driving a car, you are in danger of killing walking or standing, of being killed.
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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.
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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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Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.
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it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.
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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.
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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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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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My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.
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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 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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People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.
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What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.
Mary McCarthy