Mary McCarthy Quotes (79 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

Mary McCarthy

The Groves of Academe

Mary McCarthy

Mary McCarthy: 79 quotes 5 likes

Famous Mary McCarthy Quotes

“We are the hero of our own story.”

Mary McCarthy

“In violence, we forget who we are.”

Mary McCarthy

"Characters in Fiction", p. 276. First published in Partisan Review (March 1961)
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

“A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.”

Mary McCarthy

"Up the Ladder from Charm to Vogue", p. 185
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

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

Mary McCarthy

Source: Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975

“You mustn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.”

Mary McCarthy book The Group

Dottie in Ch. 2
The Group (1963)

“Judas was not a monster, though his act was monstrous; he was a man, the twelfth part of humanity, and his sin was that he could betray for thirty pieces of silver, like any common informer. Jesus was uncommon, not Judas.”

Mary McCarthy

"The Hue and Cry"
The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays (1970)

Mary McCarthy Quotes about people

“The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the bother of talk after dinner.”

Mary McCarthy

"Up the Ladder from Charm to Vogue", p. 185. First published in two parts in The Reporter (July 18 and August 1, 1950)
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

“To be disesteemed by people you don’t have much respect for is not the worst fate.”

Mary McCarthy

New York Times (27 August 1984)

“People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.”

Mary McCarthy

"The Contagion of Ideas", p. 54
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

“The clamor of agreement betrayed the anti-French sentiment ever ready to be mobilized when Americans in Paris got together. And as happened with anti-Semites merrily fraternizing, nobody at the table seemed to remember that there were French people present.”

Mary McCarthy

"Round Table, with the Damsel Parcenet"
Birds of America (1971)

“Yet it was part of being an American that, once you got started, you felt impelled to tell all the people all the truth all the time.”

Mary McCarthy

"To Be a Pilgrim"
Birds of America (1971)

“As Socrates showed, love cannot be anything else but the love of the good. But to find the good is very rare. That is why love is rare, in spite of what people think. It happens to one in a thousand, and to that one it is a revelation. No wonder he cannot communicate with the other nine hundred and ninety-nine.”

Mary McCarthy book The Group

Mr Schneider in Ch. 12
The Group (1963)

Mary McCarthy: Trending quotes

“Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty; it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils”

Mary McCarthy

"The Hue and Cry," The Writing on the Wall (1970)
Context: Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty; it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils (“a person of inhuman and horrible cruelty or wickedness,” OED, Sense 4). Such an unnatural being is more horrible to contemplate than an Eichmann — that is, aesthetically worse — but morally an Ilse Koch was surely less culpable than Eichmann since she seems to have had no trace of human feeling and therefore was impassable to conscience.

“I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you’re older, I think, is that — how to express this — you really must make the self.”

Mary McCarthy

Interview by Elisabeth Niebuhr in "The Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work, Second Series" (1963) [the interview took place in March 1961]
Context: I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you’re older, I think, is that — how to express this — you really must make the self. It's absolutely useless to look for it, you won’t find it, but it’s possible in some sense to make it.

Feeling , Thinking

“Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.”

Mary McCarthy

"The Contagion of Ideas", p. 44. A speech delivered to a group of teachers (Summer 1952); not previously published
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

Behavior

Mary McCarthy Quotes

“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

As quoted in "Lady with a Switchblade" in LIFE magazine (20 September 1963) http://books.google.com/books?id=e1IEAAAAMBAJ&q=%22Europeans+used+to+say+Americans+were+puritanical+Then+they+discovered+that+we+were+not+puritans+So+now+they+say+that+we+are+obsessed+with+sex%22&pg=PA62#v=onepage

Sex

“As happens with sports and hobbies, his enjoyment was solemnized by expertise, the rites of comparing, collating, a half-deliberate parody of scholarship like the recitation of batting averages.”

Mary McCarthy

"The Writing on the Wall"
The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays (1970)

Sport

“We all know in our gut that art educates. In other societies, they're aware of the power it has of speaking directly to the masses, teaching them to be better socialists, better citizens. The trouble is that with us it's fallen into the wrong hands. Forget the speculators… The concept of the collector is so rotten by now that it stinks.”

Mary McCarthy book Cannibals and Missionaries

Cannibals and Missionaries (1979)

Education , Art , Forgetting

“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.”

Mary McCarthy

"Gandhi", p. 22. First published in Politics (Winter 1948)
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

Way

“Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.”

Mary McCarthy

Comment about Lillian Hellman in a televised interview (1979) on The Dick Cavett Show; this prompted a defamation suit against McCarthy which was dropped after Hellman's death: "If someone had told me, don't say anything about Lillian Hellman because she'll sue you, it wouldn't have stopped me. It might have spurred me on. I didn't want her to die. I wanted her to lose in court. I wanted her around for that."

Lie

“If someone tells you he is going to make "a realistic decision," you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.”

Mary McCarthy

"The American Realist Playwrights", p. 296. First published in Harper's Magazine (July 1961)
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

Understanding , Decision

“Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.”

Mary McCarthy

"My Confession", p. 74. First published in two parts in The Reporter (December 22, 1953 and January 5, 1954)
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

Age , Past

“Our anti-Communism came to us neither as the fruit of a special wisdom nor as a humiliating awakening from a prolonged deception, but as a natural event, the product of chance and propinquity. One thing followed another, and the will had little to say about it. For my part, during that year, I realized, with a certain wistfulness, that it was too late for me to become any kind of Marxist. Marxism, I saw, from the learned young man I listened to at Committee meetings, was something you had to take up young, like ballet dancing.”

Mary McCarthy

"My Confession", p. 102
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

Wisdom , Communication , Nature , Learning

“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”

Mary McCarthy book Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

"To the Reader"
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957)

Children , World , History , Birth

“I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.”

Mary McCarthy

Commenting on her novel The Group. New York Herald Tribune (5 January 1964)

“I do not mind if I lose my soul for all eternity. If the kind of God exists Who would damn me for not working out a deal with Him, then that is unfortunate. I should not care to spend eternity in the company of such a person.”

Mary McCarthy book Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

"To the Reader"
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957)

God , Soul , Personality

“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.”

Mary McCarthy

Source: How I Grew (1987), Ch. 6

Pain , Thinking , Memory

“When Henry Mulcahy, a middle-aged instructor of literature at Jocelyn College, Jocelyn, Pennsylvania, unfolded the President's letter and became aware of its contents, he gave a sudden sharp cry of impatience and irritation, as if such interruptions could positively be brooked no longer.”

Mary McCarthy book The Groves of Academe

Source: The Groves of Academe (1952), Ch. I, p. 293, first lines of novel

Age , Literature , Cry

“In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.”

Mary McCarthy

"Solutions," Vietnam (1967)

“As subjects, we all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.”

Mary McCarthy

"Characters in Fiction", p. 291
Sometimes misquoted as "We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story."
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

“[I]n science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.”

Mary McCarthy

"The Fact in Fiction", p. 266. First published in Partisan Review (Summer 1960)
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

Science

“I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets.”

Mary McCarthy

Look (26 February 1964)

Women , Secret , Feeling

“Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret.”

Mary McCarthy

"My Confession", p. 76
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

Thinking

“Of all the men I slept with in my studio-bed on Gay Street (and there were a lot: I stopped counting) I liked Bill Mangold the best. Until I began to see Philip Rahv.”

Mary McCarthy

Source: Intellectual Memoirs: New York 1936–1938 (1992), Ch. 2

Men

“It was June, 1933, one week after Commencement, when Kay Leiland Strong, Vassar '33, the first of her class to run around the table at the Class Day dinner, was married to Harald Petersen, Reed '27, in the chapel of St. George's Church, P. E., Karl F. Reiland, Rector.”

Mary McCarthy book The Group

Source: The Group (1963), Ch. 1, first lines of novel

Strong

“To be a child is something one learns, as one learns the names of rivers or the kings of France. Childhood, for a child, is a sort of falseness, woodenness, stoniness, a lesson recited. Many children are aware of this — that is, aware of being children as a special, prosy condition: "We can't do that! We're children!" Playing children is a long boring game with occasional exciting moments.”

Mary McCarthy

"Everybody's Childhood"
The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays (1970)

Children , Game , Learning , Childhood

“The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner's visit to 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, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear.”

Mary McCarthy

"America the Beautiful: The Humanist in the Bathtub", p. 8. First published in Commentary (September 1947)
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

Feeling , Parting , Personality

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

Mary McCarthy

Birds of Americs (1965), "Epistle from Mother Carey's Chicken"

Behavior

“Combativeness was, I suppose, the dominant trait in my grandmother’s nature. An aggressive churchgoer, she was quite without Christian feeling; the mercy of the Lord Jesus had never entered her heart. Her piety was an act of war against the Protestant ascendancy […] articles attacking birth control, divorce, mixed marriages, Darwin and secular education were her favourite reading. The teachings of the Church did not interest her, except as they were a rebuke to others […] The extermination of Protestantism, rather than spiritual perfection, was the boon she prayed for.”

Mary McCarthy book Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

Source: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), Ch. 1

Marriage , War , Education , Feeling

“It was getting rather alarming. I realised one day that in twenty four hours I had slept with three different men. And one morning I was in bed with somebody while over his head I talked on the telephone with somebody else…I did not feel promiscuous. Maybe no-one does. And maybe more girls sleep with more men than you would ever think to look at them.”

Mary McCarthy

Source: Intellectual Memoirs: New York 1936–1938 (1992), Ch. 2

Men , Feeling , Girl , Thinking

“You know what my favourite quotation is? […] It’s from Chaucer […] Criseyde says it, "I am myne owene woman, wel at ese."”

Mary McCarthy

First published in Partisan Review (July-August 1941)
Source: The Company She Keeps (1942), Ch. 3 "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt", p. 70.

“I combine concrete cynicism with a sort of vague optimism.”

Mary McCarthy

As quoted in "Lady with a Switchblade" in LIFE magazine (20 September 1963)

Optimism

“I was able to compare the sexual equipment of the various men I made love with and there were amazing differences, in both length and massiveness. One handsome married man, who used to arrive with two Danishes from a very good bakery, had a penis about the size and shape of a lead pencil; he shall remain nameless. In my experience there was usually a relation to height, as Philip Rahv and Bill Mangold, both tall men, bore out. There may be dwarfish men with monstrously large organs, but I have never known one. It was not until later, after my second divorce, that I met an impotent man or a pervert (two of the latter)… None of my partners, the reader will be relieved to hear, had a venereal disease.”

Mary McCarthy

Source: Intellectual Memoirs: New York 1936–1938 (1992), Ch. 2

Love , Men , Disease

Mary McCarthy

"America the Beautiful: The Humanist in the Bathtub", p. 18
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

“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 an all too professional air.”

Mary McCarthy

"America the Beautiful: The Humanist in the Bathtub", p. 17
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

“[B]ureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.”

Mary McCarthy

"The Vita Activa", pp. 161–162
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

“[T]he labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that never finishes, toil that has to be begun again the moment it is completed, toil that is destroyed and consumed by the life process.”

Mary McCarthy

"The Vita Activa", p. 158. First published in The New Yorker (18 October 1958)
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

Life , Housing

“To marry a man without loving him, which was what I had just done, not really perceiving it, was a wicked action, I saw. Stiff with remorse and terror, I lay under the thin blanket through a good part of the night; as far as I could tell from what seemed a measureless distance, my untroubled mate was sleeping.”

Mary McCarthy

Source: How I Grew (1987), Ch. 9, last lines of book

Sleep , Night , Love , Making love

“A good deal of education consists of unlearning — the breaking of bad habits, as with a tennis serve. This was emphatically true of a Vassar education: where other colleges aimed at development, bringing out what was already there like a seed waiting to sprout, Vassar remade a girl. Vassar was transformational.”

Mary McCarthy

Source: How I Grew (1987), Ch. 8

Girl , Education , Bad luck , Waiting

“About truth I have always been monotheistic. It has been an article of faith with me, going back to college days, that there is a truth and that it is knowable.”

Mary McCarthy

Source: How I Grew (1987), Ch. 7

Truth , Faith

“Nobody in this land, certainly no Christian, can accept hating on a full-time basis; it is apt to reflect back on the hater.”

Mary McCarthy

Source: How I Grew (1987), Ch. 4

Time , Hate

“You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk. In the course of my history, not love or marriage so much as friendship has promoted growth.”

Mary McCarthy

Source: How I Grew (1987), Ch. 1

Tree , Friendship , History , Marriage

“You never learn a language unless you use it.”

Mary McCarthy book Cannibals and Missionaries

Source: Cannibals and Missionaries (1979), Ch. 11

Learning

“Idealists, I know, are dangerous, but the claim of the ideal (Ibsen) has to be felt or else…. Or else the world, our deteriorating world, will continue on its course by sheer inertia. Inertia is taking over, right here; you can sense it.”

Mary McCarthy book Cannibals and Missionaries

From Sophie Weil's diary in "Envoi"
Cannibals and Missionaries (1979)

World , Sense

“It struck him that the closer Nature got to the human, the uglier it could be. You could hardly find a plant that was not beautiful, even in a strange mottled way, but there were plenty of hideous simians.”

Mary McCarthy

"Two-thirds of a Ghost"
Birds of America (1971)

Way , Beauty , Nature

“Ars longa vita brevis est was a truth that could not be argued with in the Eternal City.”

Mary McCarthy

"Joy to the World"
Birds of America (1971)

Truth

“If you want to be your own master, his father used to say, always be surprised by evil; never anticipate it.”

Mary McCarthy

"Greek Fire"
Birds of America (1971)

Evil

“At home I never thought I was much of a conformist. But I now see that I was without knowing it. I did what everybody else did without being aware I was copying them. Here I mind being different. Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.”

Mary McCarthy

"Epistle from Mother Carey's Chicken"
Birds of America (1971)

Home , Behavior , Making love

“Maybe any action becomes cowardly once you stop to reason about it. Conscience doth make cowards of us all, eh mamma mia?”

Mary McCarthy

If you start an argument with yourself, that makes two people at least, and when you have two people, one of them starts appeasing the other.
"Epistle from Mother Carey's Chicken"
Peter quotes 'Conscience doth make cowards of us all' from the 'To be, or not to be' speech in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act 3, scene 1.
Birds of America (1971)

Making love

“Polly saw the point. Would she wish not to have been born? Unhappy as she was, she could not say that. Even when she had wished to die, she had not wished never to have been born. Nobody alive could do that.”

Mary McCarthy book The Group

Source: The Group (1963), Ch. 12