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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
Common
Everyone
Truth
Love
Recognizable
Ruling
Ordinary
Novel
Passion

More quotes by Mary McCarthy

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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.
Mary McCarthy
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Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.
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.
Mary McCarthy
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A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.
Mary McCarthy
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We are the hero of our own story.
Mary McCarthy
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The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers suspicion is reserved for friends.
Mary McCarthy
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It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.
Mary McCarthy
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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.
Mary McCarthy
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We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.
Mary McCarthy
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For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.
Mary McCarthy
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From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people.
Mary McCarthy
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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.
Mary McCarthy
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it came to me, as we sat there, glumly ordering lunch, that for extremely stupid people anti-Semitism was a form of intellectuality, the sole form of intellectuality of which they were capable. It represented, in a rudimentary way, the ability to make categories, to generalize.
Mary McCarthy
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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.
Mary McCarthy
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With extramarital courtship, the deception was prolonged where it had been ephemeral, necessary where it had been frivolous, conspiratorial where it had been lonely.
Mary McCarthy
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A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.
Mary McCarthy
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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.
Mary McCarthy
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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
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For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.
Mary McCarthy
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The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth like canasta, it does away with the brother of talk after dinner.
Mary McCarthy