Quote

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

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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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For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.
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If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.
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The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.
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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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A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.
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Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships - someone always wins.
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Once the state is looked upon as the source of rights, rather than their bound protector, freedom becomes conditional on the pleasure of the state.
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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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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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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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it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.
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Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils.
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We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.
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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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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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Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.
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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'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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