Mary McCarthy Quotes - Page 5

Quotes about:

• The consumer today is the victim of the manufacturer who launches on him a regiment of products for which he must make room in his soul.

  Mary McCarthy

  Soul, Today, Rooms

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

  4 Copy quote

• 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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• 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)

  7 Copy quote

• 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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• 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”

  10 Copy quote

• 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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• 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

  19 Copy quote

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

  Mary McCarthy

  Humanity, Tubs, Bathroom

  4 Copy quote

• Leisure was the sine qua non of the full Renaissance. The feudal nobility, having lost its martial function, sought diversion all over Europe in cultivated pastimes: sonneteering, the lute, games and acrostics, travel, gentlemanly studies and sports, hunting and hawking, treated as arts.

  Mary McCarthy

  Sports, Art, Hunting

  Mary McCarthy (1956). “Venice observed”

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Mary McCarthy

  Secret, Literature, Given

  Look Magazine, February 26, 1964.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Hero, Suspense Novels, Novelists

  "On the Contrary".

  13 Copy quote

• The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable.

  Mary McCarthy

  Character, Views, Argument

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

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• All ideas advanced to deal with the Florentine noise problem, the Florentine traffic problem, are Utopian, and nobody believes in them, just as nobody believed in Machiavelli's Prince, a Utopian image of the ideally self-interested despot.

  Mary McCarthy

  Believe, Self, Ideas

  Mary McCarthy (2016). “The Stones of Florence”, p.18, Pickle Partners Publishing

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• ... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

  Mary McCarthy

  Happy, Children, America

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

  4 Copy quote

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• The furniture and trappings in the apartment are all in a state of flux - here today, gone tomorrow. Nothing is anchored to its place, not even the coffee-pot, which floats off and returns, on the tide of the signora's marine nature.

  Mary McCarthy

  Coffee, Marine, Gone

  Mary McCarthy (1956). “Venice observed”

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• Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.

  Mary McCarthy

  Sex, Character, Space

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

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