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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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To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.
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If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil never anticipate it.
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The return to a favorite novel is generally tied up with changes in oneself that must be counted as improvements, but have the feel of losses. It is like going back to a favorite house, country, person nothing is where it belongs, including one's heart.
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Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.
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...the tourist Venice is Venice.
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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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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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I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets.
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People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.
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Old money is fully as moronic as new money but it has inherited an appearance of cultivation.
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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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The happy ending is our national belief.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing.
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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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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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