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Author: Mary McCarthy
Quotes of Author: Mary McCarthy
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  1. Mary McCarthy _ The Group

    You have to live without love, learn not to need it in order to live with it.
    book-quote

  2. Mary McCarthy _ Between Friends: The

    I would have said that Eichmann was profoundly, egregiously stupid, and for me stupidity is not the same as having a low IQ. Here I rather agree with Kant, that stupidity is caused, not by brain failure, but by a wicked heart. Insensitiveness, opacity, inability to make connections, ofter accompanied by low "animal" cunning. One cannot help feeling that this mental oblivion is , by the heart or the moral will--an active preference, and that explains why one is so irritated by stupidity, which is not the case when one is dealing with a truly backward individual.
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  3. Mary McCarthy _ Memories of a Catholic

    I came back {to school} in the fall, as a full-time boarder, with a certain set to my jaw, determined to go it alone. A summer passed in thoughtful isolation, rowing on a mountain lake, diving from a pier, had made me perfectly reckless. I was going to get myself recognized at whatever price. It was in this cold, empty gambler's mood, common to politicians and adolescents, that I surveyed the convent setup. If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to do it by badness.
    book-quotefamegamblingcatholic-school

  4. Mary McCarthy _ The Oasis

    Not knaves, fools.
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  5. Mary McCarthy _ The Oasis

    independent working girls out in the world, in pursuit of the kind of adventure that would strengthen, not deplete, us, as we would then be armed with experience.
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  6. Mary McCarthy

    The Venetians catalogue everything, including themselves. 'These grapes are brown,' I complain to the young vegetable-dealer in Santa Maria Formosa. 'What is wrong with that ? I am brown,' he replies. 'I am the housemaid of the painter Vedova,' says a maid, answering the telephone. 'I am a Jew,' begins a cross-eyed stranger who is next in line in a bookshop. 'Would you care to see the synagogue?'Almost any Venetian, even a child, will abandon whatever he is doing in order to show you something. They do not merely give directions; they lead, or in some cases follow, to make sure you are still on the right way. Their great fear is that you will miss an artistic or 'typical' sight. A sacristan, who has already been tipped, will not let you leave until you have seen the last Palma Giovane. The 'pope' of the Chiesa dei Greci calls up to his housekeeper to throw his black hat out the window and settles it firmly on his broad brow so that he can lead us personally to the Archaeological Museum in the Piazza San Marco; he is afraid that, if he does not see to it, we shall miss the Greek statuary there
    venice

  7. Mary McCarthy _ The Group:

    It was the cocktail hour in Priss's room at New York Hospital-terribly gay.
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  8. Mary McCarthy _ The Group

    Elinor was always firmly convinced of other people's hypocrisy since she could not believe that they noticed less than she did.
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  9. Mary McCarthy _ The Oasis

    boredom and urban cynicism had become so natural to them that an experience from which these qualities were absent seemed to be, in some way, defective.
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  10. Mary McCarthy _ The Oasis

    They had caught a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, a mirror placed at a turning point where they had expected to see daylight and freedom, and though each of them, individually, was far from believing himself perfect, all had counted on the virtues of others to rescue them themselves.
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  11. Mary McCarthy _ The Oasis

    The fault, in their view, lay with no single person, but with the middle class composition of the colony, which, feeling itself imperiled, had acted instinctively, as an organism, to extrude the riffraff from its midst.
    book-quote

  12. Mary McCarthy _ The Group:

    But this poor chap is a dangerous neurotic." Polly laughed. "So you saw that, Father. I never could. He always seemed so normal." "It's the same thing," said her father, putting the groceries away. "All neurotics are petty bourgeois. And vice versa. Madness is too revolutionary for them. They can't go the whole hog. We madmen are the aristocrats of mental illness. You could never marry that fellow, my dear.
    book-quote
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