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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.

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
Rich
Alarm
Poor
Alarms
Doe
Grammar
Wells
Mainly
Well
Nearly
Matter
Level
Much
Poverty
Levels
Illiteracy

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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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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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What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?
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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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love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.
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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.
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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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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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A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.
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The happy ending is our national belief.
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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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Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.
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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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What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.
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In violence, we forget who we are
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Driving a car, you are in danger of killing walking or standing, of being killed.
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this is the spirit of the enchantment under which Venice lies, pearly and roseate, like the Sleeping Beauty, changeless throughout the centuries, arrested, while the concrete forest of the modern world grows up around her.
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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.
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Once the state is looked upon as the source of rights, rather than their bound protector, freedom becomes conditional on the pleasure of the state.
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A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.
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