Mary McCarthy may refer to:
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.
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.
We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.
What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?
A politician or political thinker who calls himself a political realist is usually boasting that he sees politics, so to speak, in the raw; he is generally a proclaimed cynic and pessimist who makes it his business to look behind words and fine speeches for the motive. This motive is always low.
Modern neurosis began with the discoveries of Copernicus. Science made men feel small by showing him that the earth was not the center of the universe.
What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.
The present can try to bury the past, an operation that is most atrocious when it is most successful.
Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a 'work' of man.
The return to a favorite novel is generally tied up with changes in oneself that must be counted as improvements, but have the feel of losses. It is like going back to a favorite house, country, person; nothing is where it belongs, including one's heart.
In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.
To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.
The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers; suspicion is reserved for friends.
A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.
Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard.
An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.
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.
Combativeness was, I suppose, the dominant trait in my grandmother's nature. An aggressive churchgoer, she was quite without Christian feeling; the mercy of the Lord Jesus had never entered her heart. Her piety was an act of war against Protestant ascendancy. . . . The teachings of the Church did not interest her, except as they were a rebuke to others.
Driving a car, you are in danger of killing; walking or standing, of being killed.
The labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that never finishes, toil that has to be begun again the moment it is completed, toil that is destroyed and consumed by the life process