A Quote by Mary McCarthy

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.

Mary McCarthy

Quote Topics

Beast Dragon Eyes Guarded Hoard Just Made Misers Really Saint Slain Unconscious Venice White Whose Worlds

Quote Author

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

Sleeping on a dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.

C. S. Lewis

Saint George killed the last dragon, and he was called a hero for it. I've never seen a dragon, and I wish he would have left at least one. Saint Patrick made a name for himself by running the snakes out of Ireland, leaving the place vulnerable to rodent infestation. This business of making saints out of men who exterminate their fellow creatures has got to stop. All I'm saying is, it's starting to get a little lonely up here at the top of the food chain.

A. Whitney Brown

We live under a prince who is an enemy to fraud, a prince whose eyes penetrate into the heart, and whom all the art of impostors can't deceive.

Moliere

I feel that when a white child goes to school only with white children, unconsciously that child grows up in many instances devoid of a world perspective. There is an unconscious provincialism, and it can develop into an unconscious superiority complex just as a Negro develops an unconscious inferiority complex.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

People who overly take care of their health are like misers. They hoard up a treasure which they never enjoy.

Laurence Sterne

Dragons, you know, we have a good deal of biology and zoology about the dragon; we know their habits. The dragon tends to guard things, and he usually has these guarded in a cave... Now dragons don't know what to do either with beautiful girls or gold, but they just hang on. There are people like this. We call them creeps.

Joseph Campbell

When I was in Mecca I noticed that their, they had no color problem. That they had people there whose eyes were blue and people there whose eyes were black, people whose skin was white, people whose skin was black, people whose hair was blond, people whose hair was black, from the whitest white person to the blackest black person.

Malcolm X

... in the eyes of its visitors, Venice has no reality of its own. Anyone visiting the place has already seen so many pictures of it that they can only attempt to view it via these clichés, and they take home photographs of Venice that are similar to the ones they already knew. Venice [is] becoming like one of those painted backdrops that photographers use in their studio.

Christian Boltanski

In between effect and cause and just beyond the range of normal sight, this glittering joker was dancing in the dragon's jaws.

Bruce Cockburn

He stared down at the golden curls of the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness. "You know," he concluded, after a while, "I think he actually looks like an Adam.

Neil Gaiman

We all have one, in one form or another. To me, this dragon is both the wild nature of ourselves and our conscience in his embodiment of the Old Code ethical behavior and morality. At the same time, he's our unconscious, the place from which our dreams arise. I just spoke my lines to the dragon within me.

Dennis Quaid

To Forget Venice is a tour de force of ventriloquism. Elegant, contemporary, and wry, the voice at its center is also capable of disarming flights of imagination as it enters and inhabits other lives across time and gender. The glittering, fetid city emerges as a complex metaphor for the human heart’s simultaneous tenderness and capacity for cruelty, its ‘silver glow / a local specialty: filth / disguised as ornament.’ This Venice is unforgettable.

Chase Twichell

On just a personal level, since I was little, I've loved fairytales, especially this one, because it is about what goes into making a beast a beast. Do you start as a beast? Do you turn into a beast because of the way that people treat you? I think it's something that is really universal and hit a chord with me when I was little, and so, hopefully we can explore some of that.

Brian Wayne Peterson

Saint George and the Dragon!-Bonny Saint George for Merry England!-The castle is won!

Walter Scott

The devil made you a slave. Your waitin' for the devil to come from the ground. Take a look around. Just look at the cross that the priest is holdin'. A beast, in sheep's clothin'. You are the prince of darkness. Hell born, demonic.