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We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.

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
Humanist
Bathroom
Million
Nation
Millions
Humanity
Nations
Bathrooms
Every
Tubs

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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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Life for the European is a career for the American it is a hazard.
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The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero.
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I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets.
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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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For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.
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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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Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.
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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.
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Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.
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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.
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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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A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.
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If someone tells you he is going to make a 'realistic decision', you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.
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A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.
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Old money is fully as moronic as new money but it has inherited an appearance of cultivation.
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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.
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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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What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?
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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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