Mary McCarthy Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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.

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

If you talked or laughed in church, told lies, had impure thoughts or conversations, you were bad; if you obeyed your parents or guardians, went to confession and communion regularly, said prayers for the dead, you were good.

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

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.

I was going to get myself recognized at any price. If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to do it by badness.

Be truthful... and pay attention. I would also recommend the avoidance of credit cards.

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

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

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

The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.

People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.