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

More quotes by Mary McCarthy

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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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We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour in other words, we are the hero of our own story.
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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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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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love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.
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The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable.
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Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.
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it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.
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Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.
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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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There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.
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If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil never anticipate it.
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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.
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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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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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An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.
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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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If someone tells you he is going to make a 'realistic decision', you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.
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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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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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