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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
Nothing
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Understanding
Understand
Often
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Cannot
Forgiveness
More quotes by Mary McCarthy
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.
Mary McCarthy
America is indeed a revelation, though not quite the one that was planned. Given a clean slate, man, it was hoped, would write the future. Instead, he has written his past.
Mary McCarthy
Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils.
Mary McCarthy
A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.
Mary McCarthy
For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.
Mary McCarthy
We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour in other words, we are the hero of our own story.
Mary McCarthy
...the tourist Venice is Venice.
Mary McCarthy
... the average Catholic perceives no connection between religion and morality, unless it is a question of someone else's morality.
Mary McCarthy
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.
Mary McCarthy
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.
Mary McCarthy
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.
Mary McCarthy
An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.
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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.
Mary McCarthy
If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.
Mary McCarthy
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.
Mary McCarthy
From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people.
Mary McCarthy
We are the hero of our own story.
Mary McCarthy
What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?
Mary McCarthy
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
Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.
Mary McCarthy
