Mary McCarthy
Mary McCarthy
Mary Therese McCarthywas an American novelist, critic and political activist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth21 June 1912
CitySeattle, WA
CountryUnited States of America
real venice world
The things of this world reveal their essential absurdity when they are put in the Venetian context. In the unreal realm of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly.
class humanity suffering
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?
careers hazards
Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard.
justice atmosphere way
An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.
freedom liberty opinion
Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.
belief happy-endings
The happy ending is our national belief.
character giving personality
Others are to us like the characters in fiction, eternal and incorrigible; the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been predictable and unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves.
reading class people
A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.
falling-in-love fall use
What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?
lying reality differences
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.
mean voice style
If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.
art brother people
The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the brother of talk after dinner.
tree mind age
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.
decision choices pay
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.