Quote

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.

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
Like
Century
Arrested
World
Modern
Sleeping
Grows
Forest
Sleep
Centuries
Beauty
Concrete
Pearly
Lying
Forests
Changeless
Spirit
Throughout
Enchantment
Around
Lies
Venice

More quotes by Mary McCarthy

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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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An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.
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it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.
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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.
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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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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.
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Others are to us like the characters in fiction, eternal and incorrigible the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been predictable and unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves.
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To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.
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Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.
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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.
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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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Old money is fully as moronic as new money but it has inherited an appearance of cultivation.
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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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We are the hero of our own story.
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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 breakdown of our language, evident in the misuse, i.e., the misunderstanding of nouns and adjectives, is most grave, though perhaps not so conspicuous, in the handling of prepositions, those modest little connectives that hold the parts of a phrase or a sentence together. They are the joints of any language, what make it, literally, articulate.
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Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.
Mary McCarthy
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...the tourist Venice is Venice.
Mary McCarthy
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The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.
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Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.
Mary McCarthy