Quote

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.

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
Appears
Canals
Folly
Venice
Vast
Unreal
Essential
Absurdity
Essentials
Realm
Real
Reveal
Things
Context
Venetian
World
Realms
Contrivances

More quotes by Mary McCarthy

Image
Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.
Mary McCarthy
Image
To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.
Mary McCarthy
Image
Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.
Mary McCarthy
Image
If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil never anticipate it.
Mary McCarthy
Image
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.
Mary McCarthy
Image
Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.
Mary McCarthy
Image
My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.
Mary McCarthy
Image
The dictator is also the scapegoat in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance.
Mary McCarthy
Image
For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.
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
A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.
Mary McCarthy
Image
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.
Mary McCarthy
Image
most people did not care to be taught what they did not already know it made them feel ignorant.
Mary McCarthy
Image
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.
Mary McCarthy
Image
... the average Catholic perceives no connection between religion and morality, unless it is a question of someone else's morality.
Mary McCarthy
Image
Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.
Mary McCarthy
Image
What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?
Mary McCarthy
Image
An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.
Mary McCarthy
Image
Others are to us like the characters in fiction, eternal and incorrigible the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been predictable and unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves.
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