Mary McCarthy: Trending quotes

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Mary McCarthy: 158 quotes6 likes

“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.”

"America the Beautiful: The Humanist in the Bathtub", p. 17
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.”

New York Times (27 August 1984)

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

"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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

Mary McCarthy book Cannibals and Missionaries

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

“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)

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

"Greek Fire"
Birds of America (1971)

“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.”

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

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

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)

“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.”

"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)

“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