Mary McCarthy may refer to:
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.
It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.
I shall never send for a priest or recite an Act of Contrition in my last moments. I do not mind if I lose my soul for all eternity. If the kind of God exists Who would damn me for not working out a deal with Him, then that is unfortunate. I should not care to spend eternity in the company of such a person.
The happy ending is our national belief.
Venice is the worlds unconscious: a misers glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by a saint who is really a prince who has just slain a dragon.
You know what my favourite quotation is?. . It's from Chaucer. . . Criseyde says it, "I am myne owene woman, wel at ese. "
The comic element is the incorrigible element in every human being; the capacity to learn, from experience or instruction, is what is forbidden to all comic creations and to what is comic in you and me.
love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.
The relation between life and literature - a final antimony - is one of mutual plagiarism.
To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.
You mustn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.
There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.
If you talked or laughed in church, told lies, had impure thoughts or conversations, you were bad; if you obeyed your parents or guardians, went to confession and communion regularly, said prayers for the dead, you were good.
. . . 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.
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.
Anti-Semitism is a horrible disease from which nobody is immune, and it has a kind of evil fascination that makes an enlightened person draw near the source of infection, supposedly in a scientific spirit, but really to sniff the vapors and dally with the possibility.
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
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.
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.
most people did not care to be taught what they did not already know; it made them feel ignorant.