Mary McCarthy: Trending quotes

“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

“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)

People , World , Imagination , Reading

“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)

Forgetting

“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

“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

Love

“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)

Love , Sex

“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)