Mary McCarthy Quotes - Page 6

Quotes about:

• The exile is a singular, whereas refugees tend to be thought of in the mass ... What is implied in these nuances of social standing is the respect we pay to choice. The exile appears to have made a decision, while the refugee is the very image of helplessness.

  Mary McCarthy

  Choices, Decision, Pay

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

  7 Copy quote

• I am for the ones who represent sense, and so was Jane Austen.

  Mary McCarthy

  Austen, Jane

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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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

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

  Mary McCarthy

  Real, Hazards, Helping

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• It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing.

  Mary McCarthy

  Hippie, Law, Marketing

  Mary McCarthy (1968). “Hanoi”, George Weidenfeld & Nicholson

  58 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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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• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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”

  5 Copy quote

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