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All dramatic realism is somewhat sadistic an audience is persuaded to watch something that makes it uncomfortable and from which no relief is offered - no laughter, no tears, no purgation.

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
Makes
Dramatic
Something
Uncomfortable
Laughter
Sadistic
Theater
Persuaded
Tears
Realism
Watches
Somewhat
Watch
Offered
Audience
Relief

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Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.
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Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.
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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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In violence, we forget who we are
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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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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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We are the hero of our own story.
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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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For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.
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What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?
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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.
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What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.
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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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most people did not care to be taught what they did not already know it made them feel ignorant.
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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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A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.
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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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It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.
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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