Top 25 Quotes by Mary McCarthy of 136 - Page 6

In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing

In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?

Mary McCarthy

Class, Humanity, Suffering

The return to a favorite novel is generally tied up with changes in oneself that must be counted as improvements, but have the feel of losses. It is like going back to a favorite house, country, person; nothing is where it belongs, including one's heart.

Mary McCarthy

Country, Book, Reading

Mary McCarthy (1985). “Occasional prose”, Harcourt

Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.

Mary McCarthy

Sex, Character, Space

Mary McCarthy (1964). “The humanist in the bathtub”

Europeans used to say Americans were puritanical. Then they discovered that we were not puritans. So now they say that we are obsessed with sex.

Mary McCarthy

Sex, Puritan, Obsessed

"Lady with a Switchblade". Life Magazine, September 20, 1963.

My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.

Mary McCarthy

Real, Hazards, Helping

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake. If you're interested in the cake, you get rather annoyed with people saying what species the real plum was.

Mary McCarthy

Real, Cake, People

On the wall of our life together hung a gun waiting to be fired in the final act.

Mary McCarthy

Wall, Gun, Waiting

Mary McCarthy (1993). “Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936-1938”, Harcourt

The breakdown of our language, evident in the misuse, i.e., the misunderstanding of nouns and adjectives, is most grave, though perhaps not so conspicuous, in the handling of prepositions, those modest little connectives that hold the parts of a phrase or a sentence together. They are the joints of any language, what make it, literally, articulate.

Mary McCarthy

Together, Adjectives, Phrases

Mary McCarthy (1985). “Occasional prose”, Harcourt

Leisure was the sine qua non of the full Renaissance. The feudal nobility, having lost its martial function, sought diversion all over Europe in cultivated pastimes: sonneteering, the lute, games and acrostics, travel, gentlemanly studies and sports, hunting and hawking, treated as arts.

Mary McCarthy

Sports, Art, Hunting

Mary McCarthy (1956). “Venice observed”

For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by a tornado.

Mary McCarthy

History, House, Nonchalance

Mary McCarthy (2002). “A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays”, New York Review of Books