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

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The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.
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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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It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.
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We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.
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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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In violence, we forget who we are
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Driving a car, you are in danger of killing walking or standing, of being killed.
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All dramatic realism is somewhat sadistic an audience is persuaded to watch something that makes it uncomfortable and from which no relief is offered - no laughter, no tears, no purgation.
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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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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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It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing.
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Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.
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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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The things of this world reveal their essential absurdity when they are put in the Venetian context. In the unreal realm of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly.
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The dictator is also the scapegoat in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance.
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The happy ending is our national belief.
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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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