Quote

It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.

Mary McCarthy

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Really
Hero
Life
Takes
Belief
Religious
Spiritual
Live
Without
Kind
Spirituality

More quotes by Mary McCarthy

Image
love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.
Mary McCarthy
Image
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.
Mary McCarthy
Image
Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships - someone always wins.
Mary McCarthy
Image
In moments of despair, we look on ourselves lead-enly as objects we see ourselves, our lives, as someone else might see them and may even be driven to kill ourselves if the separation, the knowledge, seems sufficiently final.
Mary McCarthy
Image
My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.
Mary McCarthy
Image
A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.
Mary McCarthy
Image
If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil never anticipate it.
Mary McCarthy
Image
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.
Mary McCarthy
Image
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.
Mary McCarthy
Image
I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand.
Mary McCarthy
Image
What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?
Mary McCarthy
Image
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.
Mary McCarthy
Image
Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.
Mary McCarthy
Image
In violence, we forget who we are
Mary McCarthy
Image
What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.
Mary McCarthy
Image
The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.
Mary McCarthy
Image
The happy ending is our national belief.
Mary McCarthy
Image
Old money is fully as moronic as new money but it has inherited an appearance of cultivation.
Mary McCarthy
Image
If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.
Mary McCarthy
Image
In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.
Mary McCarthy