Top 147 Quotes & Sayings by Mary McCarthy

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Mary McCarthy.

Last updated on September 18, 2024.

Mary Therese McCarthy was an American novelist, critic and political activist, best known for her novel The Group, her marriage to critic Edmund Wilson, and her storied feud with playwright Lillian Hellman. McCarthy was the winner of the Horizon Prize in 1949, and was awarded two Guggenheim fellowships in 1949 and 1959. She was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome. In 1973, she delivered the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, the Netherlands, under the title Can There Be a Gothic Literature? The same year she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She won the National Medal for Literature and the Edward MacDowell Medal in 1984. McCarthy held honorary degrees from Bard, Bowdoin, Colby, Smith College, Syracuse University, the University of Maine at Orono, the University of Aberdeen, and the University of Hull.

American - Novelist | June 21, 1912 - October 25, 1989

Source: Wikipedia

The labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that never finishes, toil that has to be begun again the moment it is completed, toil that is destroyed and consumed by the life process.

Mary McCarthy

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.

Mary McCarthy

When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans.

Mary McCarthy

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

Mary McCarthy

In violence, we forget who we are.

Mary McCarthy

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

Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.

Mary McCarthy

Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard.

Mary McCarthy

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.

Mary McCarthy

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

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.

Mary McCarthy

People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.

Mary McCarthy

You musn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.

Mary McCarthy

Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.

Mary McCarthy

The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.

Mary McCarthy

In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.

Mary McCarthy

The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air.

Mary McCarthy

The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

Mary McCarthy

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.

Mary McCarthy

We are the hero of our own story.

Mary McCarthy

If someone tells you he is going to make a 'realistic decision', you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.

Mary McCarthy

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.

Mary McCarthy

In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.

Mary McCarthy

Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.

Mary McCarthy

Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a 'work' of man.

Mary McCarthy

We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.

Mary McCarthy

When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you. It works, I guarantee you, this sure-fire guilt-eradicator, like a homeopathic medicine - like in small doses applied to like. It works, but I am not sure that it is a good thing.

Mary McCarthy

Understanding is often a prelude to forgiveness, but they are not the same, and we often forgive what we cannot understand (seeing nothing else to do) and understand what we cannot pardon.

Mary McCarthy

Driving a car, you are in danger of killing; walking or standing, of being killed.

Mary McCarthy

The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.

Mary McCarthy

It is impossible, except for theologians, to conceive of a world-wide scandal or a universe-wide scandal; the proof of this is the way people have settled down to living with nuclear fission, radiation poisoning, hydrogen bombs, satellites, and space rockets.

Mary McCarthy

Once the state is looked upon as the source of rights, rather than their bound protector, freedom becomes conditional on the pleasure of the state.

Mary McCarthy

What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?

Mary McCarthy

Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships - someone always wins.

Mary McCarthy

If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil; never anticipate it.

Mary McCarthy

There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.

Mary McCarthy

You know what my favourite quotation is?.. It's from Chaucer... Criseyde says it, "I am myne owene woman, wel at ese."

Mary McCarthy

Making love, we are all more alike than we are when we are talking or acting.

Mary McCarthy

You mustn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.

Mary McCarthy

The relation between life and literature - a final antimony - is one of mutual plagiarism.

Mary McCarthy

The idea of Macbeth as a conscience-torm ented man is a platitude as false as Macbeth himself. Macbeth has no conscience. His main concern throughout the play is that most selfish of all concerns: to get a good night's sleep.

Mary McCarthy

Every word she writes is a lie, including "and" and "the."

Mary McCarthy

An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.

Mary McCarthy

Congress-these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage.

Mary McCarthy

Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.

Mary McCarthy

Illiteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do.

Mary McCarthy

For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.

Mary McCarthy

A politician or political thinker who calls himself a political realist is usually boasting that he sees politics, so to speak, in the raw; he is generally a proclaimed cynic and pessimist who makes it his business to look behind words and fine speeches for the motive. This motive is always low.

Mary McCarthy

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.

Mary McCarthy

Anybody who has ever tried to rectify an injustice or set a record straight comes to feel that he is going mad.

Mary McCarthy

Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.

Mary McCarthy

most people did not care to be taught what they did not already know; it made them feel ignorant.

Mary McCarthy

From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people.

Mary McCarthy

love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.

Mary McCarthy

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.

Mary McCarthy

The present can try to bury the past, an operation that is most atrocious when it is most successful.

Mary McCarthy

it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.

Mary McCarthy

We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.

Mary McCarthy

Our language, once homely and colloquial, seeks to aggrandize our meanest activities with polysyllabic terms or it retreats from frankness into a stammering verbosity.

Mary McCarthy

Laughter is the great antidote for self-pity, maybe a specific for the malady, yet probably it does tend to dry one's feelings out a little, as if by exposing them to a vigorous wind.

Mary McCarthy

Top 147 Quotes & Sayings by Mary McCarthy

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