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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.

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
House
Stations
Foreigners
Littles
Owners
Estate
Little
Oil
Estates
Real
Flowers
Station
Rented
Every
Fruit
Farm
Michelangelo
Like
Wine
Supply
Acquiring
Property
Farms
Absorbed
Flower
Apartment
Owner

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The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers suspicion is reserved for 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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In violence, we forget who we are
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... the average Catholic perceives no connection between religion and morality, unless it is a question of someone else's morality.
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An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.
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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.
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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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My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.
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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.
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I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand.
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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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The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero.
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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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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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it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.
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love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.
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Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.
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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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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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