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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.

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
Seeing
Understanding
Understand
Often
Prelude
Else
Pardon
Political
Forgive
Cannot
Forgiveness
Nothing
Forgiving

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Driving a car, you are in danger of killing walking or standing, of being killed.
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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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Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.
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What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.
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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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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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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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If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil never anticipate it.
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What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?
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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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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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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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We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.
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From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people.
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it came to me, as we sat there, glumly ordering lunch, that for extremely stupid people anti-Semitism was a form of intellectuality, the sole form of intellectuality of which they were capable. It represented, in a rudimentary way, the ability to make categories, to generalize.
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Life for the European is a career for the American it is a hazard.
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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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It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.
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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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