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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
Upon
Baskets
Water
Venice
Like
Moses
Waters
Floating
City
Among
Cities
Basket

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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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My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.
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Life for the European is a career for the American it is a hazard.
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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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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 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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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.
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love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.
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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.
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The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers suspicion is reserved for friends.
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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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Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.
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Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.
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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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For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.
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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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it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.
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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.
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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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A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.
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