Quote

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.

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
Word
Everywhere
Erotic
Language
Loving
Belts
Body
Exciting
Hug
Tingles
Always
Labor
Jersey
Jerseys
Elements
Expressed
Overtly
Clothes
Element
Clasp
Fashion
Kiss
Bind
Present
Kissing
Plunge

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In violence, we forget who we are
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Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted. Spicy court-memoirs, the lives of gallant ladies, recollections of an ex-nun, a monk's confession, an atheist's repentance, true-to-life accounts of prostitution and bastardy gave our ancestors a penny peep into the forbidden room.
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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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What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.
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For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.
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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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most people did not care to be taught what they did not already know it made them feel ignorant.
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Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.
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Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.
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In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.
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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 idea of Macbeth as a conscience-torm ented man is a platitude as false as Macbeth himself. Macbeth has no conscience. His main concern throughout the play is that most selfish of all concerns: to get a good night's sleep.
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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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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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Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships - someone always wins.
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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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Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.
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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.
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My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.
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We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.
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