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

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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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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 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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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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My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.
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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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Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.
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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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The horror of Gandhi's murder lies not in the political motives behind it or in its consequences for Indian policy or for the future of non-violence the horror lies simply in the fact that any man could look into the face of this extraordinary person and deliberately pull a trigger.
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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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A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.
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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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A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.
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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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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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most people did not care to be taught what they did not already know it made them feel ignorant.
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Life for the European is a career for the American it is a hazard.
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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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A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.
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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.
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