Mary McCarthy Quotes about Character

All Mary McCarthy Quotes Age Character quotes Children Giving Happy Endings History House Humanity Labor Language Life Literature Lying Past

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

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.

Mary McCarthy

Prayer, Lying, Character

Mary McCarthy (1975). “The company she keeps”, Not Avail

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

Character, Giving, Personality

Mary McCarthy (1964). “The Humanist in the Bathtub”

The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is the fact that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable. ... No nation with any sense of material well-being would endure the food we eat, the cramped apartments we live in, the noise, the traffic, the crowded subways and buses. American life, in large cities, at any rate, is a perpetual assault on the senses and the nerves.

Mary McCarthy

Life, Character, Cities

"On the contrary".

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 all too much a professional air.

Mary McCarthy

Character, Eye, Air

"America the Beautiful". Commentary Magazine, September 1947.

I once started a detective story to make moneybut I couldn't get the murder to take place! At the end of three chapters I was still describing the characters and the milieu, so I thought, this is not going to work. No corpse!

Mary McCarthy

Character, Three, Stories

The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable.

Mary McCarthy

Character, Views, Argument

Mary McCarthy (1961). “On the contrary”, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy