Mary McCarthy: Use

Mary McCarthy was American writer. Explore interesting quotes on use.
Mary McCarthy: 158 quotes6 likes

“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)

“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

“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

“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)

“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)

“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

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

Mary McCarthy book Cannibals and Missionaries

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

“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)

“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)