Quotes from Mary McCarthy

She was horribly sorry for Libby, to the point where she could hardly bear seeing her; Libby's red open mouth, continually gabbling, was like a running wound in the middle of her open face.

To be curious about someone opened you to contamination from them. But she was still determined to play him a trick, to take a revenge for Kay, for women, and most of all for the impudence of his associating himself with her. She had no pity for Harald. Swinging the car into line behind the funeral procession, she waited for the question he would ask. "To be superior," he said, "of course, is not only a prerequisite for tragedy; it is tragedy. Hamlet's tragedy.

You could not love a man who was always playing hide-and-seek with you; that was the lesson she had learned.

We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.

brandy Alexanders and White Ladies and wanted to hear about a cocktail called the Clover Club that was one-third gin, one-third lemon juice, one-third grenadine, and the white of an egg.

Understanding is often a prelude to forgiveness, but they are not the same, and we often forgive what we cannot understand (seeing nothing else to do) and understand what we cannot pardon.

Yet friendship, I believe, is essential to intellectuals. It is probably the growth hormone the mind requires as it begins its activity of producing and exchanging ideas. 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.

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.

Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a 'work' of man.

Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.

On the wall of our life together hung a gun waiting to be fired in the final act.

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.

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.

There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.

love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.

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

The fact is that gardening, more than most of our other activities except sometimes love-making, confronts us with the inexplicable.

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

Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships - someone always wins.

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

In violence, we forget who we are

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 behaviour.

Modern neurosis began with the discoveries of Copernicus. Science made men feel small by showing him that the earth was not the center of the universe.

The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.