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love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.

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
Novel
Passion
Common
Everyone
Truth
Love
Recognizable
Ruling
Ordinary

More quotes by Mary McCarthy

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For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.
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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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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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There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.
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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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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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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 both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.
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The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable.
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Illiteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do.
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What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?
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In violence, we forget who we are
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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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In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.
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If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil never anticipate it.
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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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We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour in other words, we are the hero of our own story.
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Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.
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Morality did not keep well it required stable conditions it was costly it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain.
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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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