Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Studies
Feudal
Study
Hunting
Diversion
Full
Leisure
Pastime
Sports
Cultivated
Pastimes
Games
Arts
Martial
Lute
Lost
Treated
Renaissance
Sine
Art
Function
Nobility
Gentlemanly
Travel
Sought
Hawking
Europe

More quotes by Mary McCarthy

Image
Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.
Mary McCarthy
Image
For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.
Mary McCarthy
Image
Driving a car, you are in danger of killing walking or standing, of being killed.
Mary McCarthy
Image
love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.
Mary McCarthy
Image
The happy ending is our national belief.
Mary McCarthy
Image
Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships - someone always wins.
Mary McCarthy
Image
What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?
Mary McCarthy
Image
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
Image
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.
Mary McCarthy
Image
The things of this world reveal their essential absurdity when they are put in the Venetian context. In the unreal realm of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly.
Mary McCarthy
Image
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.
Mary McCarthy
Image
In violence, we forget who we are
Mary McCarthy
Image
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
Image
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.
Mary McCarthy
Image
Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.
Mary McCarthy
Image
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.
Mary McCarthy
Image
In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.
Mary McCarthy
Image
...the tourist Venice is Venice.
Mary McCarthy
Image
Morality did not keep well it required stable conditions it was costly it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain.
Mary McCarthy
Image
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