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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.

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

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The happy ending is our national belief.
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Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.
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Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.
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Driving a car, you are in danger of killing walking or standing, of being killed.
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Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.
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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.
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People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.
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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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Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.
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If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil never anticipate it.
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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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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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The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers suspicion is reserved for friends.
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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.
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America is indeed a revelation, though not quite the one that was planned. Given a clean slate, man, it was hoped, would write the future. Instead, he has written his past.
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For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.
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love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.
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Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils.
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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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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.
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