Quotes from Mary McCarthy

It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.

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.

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.

The 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.

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.

She felt really quite unequal to the tedious process of reconciliation which, in view of the fact that she was sorry, seemed to her highly unnecessary, like some legal routine or the difficulty of getting passports. Her interest in expiation quickly vanished in the face of its actuality.

He was never quite certain what he thought about anything until he had tested his opinion for seaworthiness in the course of some polemical storm.

independent working girls out in the world, in pursuit of the kind of adventure that would strengthen, not deplete, us, as we would then be armed with experience.

boredom and urban cynicism had become so natural to them that an experience from which these qualities were absent seemed to be, in some way, defective.

I mean exactly that," Mr. Davison retorted. "You've hit the nail smack on the head. We pay a price for having money. People in my position"—he turned to Kay—"have 'privilege.' That's what I read in the Nation and the New Republic." Mrs. Davison nodded. "Good," said Mr. Davison. "Now listen. The fellow who's got privilege gives up some rights or ought to.

Every subsequent moral crisis of my life, moreover, has had precisely the pattern of this struggle over the first Communion, I have battled, usually without avail, against a temptation to do something which only I knew was bad, being swept on by a need to preserve outward appearances and to live up to other people's expectations of me.

The group was not afraid of being radical either; they could see the good Roosevelt was doing, despite what Mother and Dad said; they were not taken in by party labels and thought the Democrats should be given a chance to show what they had up their sleeve.

How many women, she wondered, had poisoned their husbands, not for gain or for another man, but out of sheer inability to leave them. The extreme solution is always the simplest. The weed killer is in the soup; the man is in his coffin.

Not knaves, fools.

I came back [to school] in the fall, as a full-time boarder, with a certain set to my jaw, determined to go it alone. A summer passed in thoughtful isolation, rowing on a mountain lake, diving from a pier, had made me perfectly reckless. I was going to get myself recognized at whatever price. It was in this cold, empty gambler's mood, common to politicians and adolescents, that I surveyed the convent setup. If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to do it by badness.

the privacy to make a scene was something she would miss in Utopia Ã¢â'¬Â¦ [N]ow, surrounded by these watchers, she felt deprived of a basic right Ã¢â'¬Â¦ [to] behave badly if necessary, until [Preston] responded to her grief." And

But this poor chap is a dangerous neurotic." Polly laughed. "So you saw that, Father. I never could. He always seemed so normal." "It's the same thing," said her father, putting the groceries away. "All neurotics are petty bourgeois. And vice versa. Madness is too revolutionary for them. They can't go the whole hog. We madmen are the aristocrats of mental illness. You could never marry that fellow, my dear.

The fault, in their view, lay with no single person, but with the middle class composition of the colony, which, feeling itself imperiled, had acted instinctively, as an organism, to extrude the riffraff from its midst.

They had caught a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, a mirror placed at a turning point where they had expected to see daylight and freedom, and though each of them, individually, was far from believing himself perfect, all had counted on the virtues of others to rescue them themselves.

something had been lost that was perhaps an essential ingredient - a man can live without self-respect, but a group shatters, dispersed by the ugliness it sees reflected in itself.

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

Foreknowledge of the consequences of an act that is then performed generally argues the will to do it; if this occurs repeatedly, and the doer continues to protest that he did not will the consequences, this suggests an extreme and dangerous disassociation of the personality.

On her lips, which were dry, was a new shade of lipstick, by Tussy; her doctor had ordered her to put on lipstick and powder right in the middle of labour; he and Sloan both thought it was important for a maternity patient to keep herself up to the mark.

I have sometimes thought that Catholicism is a religion not suited to the laity, or not suited, at any rate, to the American laity, in whom it seems to bring out some of the worst traits in human nature and to lend them a sort of sanctification.