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The rationalist mind has always had its doubts about Venice. The watery city receives a dry inspection, as though it were a myth for the credulous- poets and honeymooners.

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
City
Inspection
Cities
Receives
Doubt
Venice
Though
Doubts
Mind
Dry
Honeymooners
Always
Poets
Rationalist
Myth
Watery
Poet
Credulous

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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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Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.
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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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What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?
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My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.
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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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it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.
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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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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 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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In moments of despair, we look on ourselves lead-enly as objects we see ourselves, our lives, as someone else might see them and may even be driven to kill ourselves if the separation, the knowledge, seems sufficiently final.
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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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Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.
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Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.
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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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...the tourist Venice is Venice.
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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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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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An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.
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