Quotes from Mary McCarthy

You have to live without love, learn not to need it in order to live with it.

He was a thoroughly bad hat, then, but that was the kind, of course, that nice women broke their hearts over.

It came to her that he was going to leave without making love to her. This would mean they had made love for the last time this morning. But that did not count: this morning they did not know it was for the last time. When the door shut behind him, she still could not believe it. "It can't end like this," she said to herself over and over, drumming with her knuckles on her mouth to keep from screaming.

He would have been far more attractive to her if she could have trusted him. You could not love a man who was always playing hide-and-seek with you; that was the lesson she had learned.

His flexible mind extended to take in his opponent's position and then snapped back like an elastic, with the illusion that it had covered ground.

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

She considered [her] life, which had not been a life but only a sort of greeting, a Hello There.

I felt caught in a dilemma that was new to me then but which since has become horribly familiar: the trap of adult life, in which you are held, wriggling, powerless to act because you can see both sides. On that occasion, as generally in the future, I compromised.

She rarely showed her emotions, which appeared to have been burned out by the continual short-circuiting of her attention.