A Quote by Mary McCarthy

The fact is that gardening, more than most of our other activities except sometimes love-making, confronts us with the inexplicable.

Mary McCarthy

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Activities Except Fact Gardening Inexplicable Love Making More Most Other Our Sometimes Sometimes Love Than Us

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Mary McCarthy
American - Novelist
June 21, 1912 - October 25, 1989

Unhappy love freezes all our affections: our own souls grow inexplicable to us. More than we gained while we were happy we lose by the reverse.

Madame de Stael

I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.

May Sarton

Love is like a tree: it grows by itself, roots itself deeply in our being and continues to flourish over a heart in ruin. The inexplicable fact is that the blinder it is, the more tenacious it is. It is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable.

Victor Hugo

Time is our ultimate scarcity. Isaac Newton can give us more electricity, but he can't give us more than 24 hours of the day of time. And so we're constantly having to sacrifice alternate activities to get the one that pleases us most.

Paul Samuelson

...I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except when I'm making love. Two things when you forget time, when nothing exists except the moment--the moment of writing, the moment of love. That perfect concentration is bliss.

May Sarton

And among the other honours and rewards our young men can win for distinguished service in war and in other activities, will be more frequent opportunities to sleep with a woman; this will give us a pretext for ensuring that most of our children are born of that parent.

Plato

The fact is, for most of us, what happens to ourselves is so much more important than what happens to other people that the smallest mote in our own eye will prevent us from being unduly harrowed by someone else's beam.

Patricia Wentworth

But we should be mindful as we argue about our differences that so much more unites than divides us. We should also note that our differences, when compared with those in many, if not most, other countries, are smaller than we sometimes imagine them to be.

John McCain

I do like to work. Some jobs are better than others. That's the thing: You really don't know. I've enjoyed making movies for lots of different reasons. Sometimes, it was the other people. Sometimes, it was the fact that I was really good in it. Sometimes, it was the location. Sometimes, it was the paycheck.

Christopher Walken

Christ's boundless grace confronts our deep necessities. Christ's promised presence confronts our sad and gloomy loneliness. Jesus thus filled with grace so overflowing, with love so tender, with sympathy so exquisite, with power so illimitable, with resources so boundless, with a nature so changeless, stands before us and says to each trembling heart, 'Fear not!'

Octavius Winslow

Perhaps extreme danger strips us of all pretenses, all ambitions, all confusions, focusing us more intensely than we are otherwise ever focused, so that we remember what we otherwise spend most of our lives forgetting: that our nature and purpose is, more than anything else, to love and to make love, to take joy from the beauty of the world, to live with an awareness that the future is not as real a place for any of us as are the present and the past.

Dean Koontz

We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves, we're difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning?

Geoffrey Hill

Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears.

Gregory David Roberts

By exploring other worlds we safeguard this one. By itself, I think this fact more than justifies the money our species has spent in sending ships to other worlds. It is our fate to live during one of the most perilous and, at the same time, one of the most hopeful chapters in human history.

Carl Sagan

I've discovered that sometimes God wants us to live inside of the questions. Sometimes he wants us to linger in the waiting, hoping, praying. In fact, sometimes it's right in the middle of our darkness in the middle of our crisis, in the middle of our Plan B struggles that God speaks most clearly.

Pete Wilson

Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of making meaning. It widens the space of our inner lives. It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language.

Edward Hirsch

A Quote by Mary McCarthy

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