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Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.

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
Judge
Judging
Collector
Taxes
Sweeter
Responsibility
Collectors
Law
Martial
Anything
Rude
Unjust
Troops

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A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.
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Driving a car, you are in danger of killing walking or standing, of being killed.
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...the tourist Venice is Venice.
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Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.
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Life for the European is a career for the American it is a hazard.
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What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.
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A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.
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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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In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.
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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.
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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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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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To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.
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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.
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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 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
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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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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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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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We are the hero of our own story.
Mary McCarthy