Mary McCarthy Quotes - Page 5

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• What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake. If you're interested in the cake, you get rather annoyed with people saying what species the real plum was.

  Mary McCarthy

  Real, Cake, People

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• On the wall of our life together hung a gun waiting to be fired in the final act.

  Mary McCarthy

  Wall, Gun, Waiting

  Mary McCarthy (1993). “Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936-1938”, Harcourt

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• I once started a detective story to make money—but I couldn't get the murder to take place! At the end of three chapters I was still describing the characters and the milieu, so I thought, this is not going to work. No corpse!

  Mary McCarthy

  Character, Three, Stories

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• It really seems to me sometimes that the only hope is space. That is to say, perhaps the most energetic—in a bad sense—elements will move on to a new world in space. The problems of mass society will be transported into space, leaving behind this world as a kind of Europe, which then eventually tourists will visit. The Old World. I'm only half joking.

  Mary McCarthy

  Moving, Europe, Space

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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.

  Mary McCarthy

  Despair, Finals, Looks

  Mary McCarthy (1961). “On the contrary”, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy

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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.

  Mary McCarthy

  Writing, Past, Men

  Mary McCarthy (1964). “The humanist in the bathtub”

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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

  Lying, Reality, Differences

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• This grossly advertised wonder [Venice], this gold idol with clay feet, this trompe-l'oeil, this painted deception, this cliche-what intelligent iconoclast could fail to experience a destructive impulse in her presence?

  Mary McCarthy

  Intelligent, Idols, Feet

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• The perennial wonder of Venice is to peer at herself in her canals and find that she exists-incredible as it seems. It is the same reassurance that a looking-glass offers us: the guarantee that we are real.

  Mary McCarthy

  Real, Glasses, Guarantees That

  Mary McCarthy (1956). “Venice observed”

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• It [Socialism] was a kind of political hockey played by big, gaunt, dyspeptic girls in pants.

  Mary McCarthy

  Girl, Hockey, Political

  Mary McCarthy (2002). “A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays”, New York Review of Books

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• As soon as you become a writer, you lose contact with ordinary experience or tend to. ... the worst fate of a writer is to become a writer.

  Mary McCarthy

  Fate, Ordinary, Worst

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• Who are the advertising men kidding, besides the European tourist? Between the tired, sad, gentle faces of the subway riders and the grinning Holy Families of the Ad-Mass, there exists no possibility of even a wishful identification.

  Mary McCarthy

  Tired, Men, Faces

  Mary McCarthy (1964). “The Humanist in the Bathtub”

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• The breakdown of our language, evident in the misuse, i.e., the misunderstanding of nouns and adjectives, is most grave, though perhaps not so conspicuous, in the handling of prepositions, those modest little connectives that hold the parts of a phrase or a sentence together. They are the joints of any language, what make it, literally, articulate.

  Mary McCarthy

  Together, Adjectives, Phrases

  Mary McCarthy (1985). “Occasional prose”, Harcourt

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• Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret.

  Mary McCarthy

  Regret, Thinking, Action

  Mary McCarthy (2002). “A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays”, New York Review of Books

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• My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.

  Mary McCarthy

  Real, Hazards, Helping

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• Old money is fully as moronic as new money but it has inherited an appearance of cultivation.

  Mary McCarthy

  Appearance, Cultivation, Old Money

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• The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof

  Mary McCarthy

  Europe, America, Negative

  "America the Beautiful: The Humanist in the Bathtub" (1947)

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• Any sizeable Portuguese town looks like a superstitious bride's finery - something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.

  Mary McCarthy

  Blue, Europe, Looks

  Mary McCarthy (2002). “A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays”, New York Review of Books

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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.

  Mary McCarthy

  Growing Up, Lying, Sleep

  Mary McCarthy (1956). “Venice observed”

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• Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.

  Mary McCarthy

  Equality, Somewhere Else, Agendas

  Mary McCarthy (2017). “Mary McCarthy: Novels 1963-1979”, p.421, Library of America

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• You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk.

  Mary McCarthy

  Tree, Mind, Age

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• In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?

  Mary McCarthy

  Class, Humanity, Suffering

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• 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.

  Mary McCarthy

  Country, Book, Reading

  Mary McCarthy (1985). “Occasional prose”, Harcourt

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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.

  Mary McCarthy

  History, House, Nonchalance

  Mary McCarthy (2002). “A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays”, New York Review of Books

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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 ... you really must make the self. It is absolutely useless to look for it, you won't find it, but it's possible in some sense to make it. I don't mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and choose the self you want.

  Mary McCarthy

  Mean, Thinking, Self

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