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Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.
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
City
Among
Cities
Basket
Upon
Baskets
Water
Venice
Like
Moses
Waters
Floating
More quotes by Mary McCarthy
Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.
Mary McCarthy
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
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.
Mary McCarthy
If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil never anticipate it.
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
Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.
Mary McCarthy
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
... the average Catholic perceives no connection between religion and morality, unless it is a question of someone else's morality.
Mary McCarthy
What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?
Mary McCarthy
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.
Mary McCarthy
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.
Mary McCarthy
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.
Mary McCarthy
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.
Mary McCarthy
There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.
Mary McCarthy
I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets.
Mary McCarthy
A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.
Mary McCarthy
Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.
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
Morality did not keep well it required stable conditions it was costly it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain.
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
