Top 120 Mary McCarthy Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you’re older, I think, is that you really must make the self.”

— Mary McCarthy

52. “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.”

— Mary McCarthy

53. “I am for the ones who represent sense, and so was Jane Austen.”

— Mary McCarthy

54. “All dramatic realism is somewhat sadistic; an audience is persuaded to watch something that makes it uncomfortable and from which no relief is offered – no laughter, no tears, no purgation.”

— Mary McCarthy

55. “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.”

— Mary McCarthy

56. “A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.”

— Mary McCarthy

57. “Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.”

— Mary McCarthy

58. “It is impossible, except for theologians, to conceive of a world-wide scandal or a universe-wide scandal; the proof of this is the way people have settled down to living with nuclear fission, radiation poisoning, hydrogen bombs, satellites, and space rockets.”

— Mary McCarthy

59. “The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the brother of talk after dinner.”

— Mary McCarthy

60. “Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.”

— Mary McCarthy

61. “With extramarital courtship, the deception was prolonged where it had been ephemeral, necessary where it had been frivolous, conspiratorial where it had been lonely.”

— Mary McCarthy

62. “It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing.”

— Mary McCarthy

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

— Mary McCarthy

64. “Leisure was the sine qua non of the full Renaissance. The feudal nobility, having lost its martial function, sought diversion all over Europe in cultivated pastimes: sonneteering, the lute, games and acrostics, travel, gentlemanly studies and sports, hunting and hawking, treated as arts.”

— Mary McCarthy

65. “For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by a tornado.”

— Mary McCarthy

66. “One of the big features of living alone was that you could talk to yourself all you wanted and address imaginary audiences, running the gamut of emotion.”

— Mary McCarthy

67. “Who are the advertising men kidding, besides the European tourist? Between the tired, sad, gentle faces of the subway riders and the grinning Holy Families of the Ad-Mass, there exists no possibility of even a wishful identification.”

— Mary McCarthy

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

— Mary McCarthy

69. “A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.”

— Mary McCarthy

70. “To be disesteemed by people you don’t have much respect for is not the worst fate.”

— Mary McCarthy

71. “People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.”

— Mary McCarthy

72. “Laughter is the great antidote for self-pity, maybe a specific for the malady, yet probably it does tend to dry one’s feelings out a little, as if by exposing them to a vigorous wind...”

— Mary McCarthy

73. “Others are to us like the characters in fiction, eternal and incorrigible; the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been predictable and unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves.”

— Mary McCarthy

74. “I’m afraid I’m not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you’ve given away trade secrets.”

— Mary McCarthy

75. “Maybe any action becomes cowardly once you stop to reason about it.”

— Mary McCarthy

76. “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.”

— Mary McCarthy

77. “The relation between life and literature – a final antimony – is one of mutual plagiarism.”

— Mary McCarthy

78. “In morals as in politics anarchy is not for the weak.”

— Mary McCarthy

79. “All ideas advanced to deal with the Florentine noise problem, the Florentine traffic problem, are Utopian, and nobody believes in them, just as nobody believed in Machiavelli’s Prince, a Utopian image of the ideally self-interested despot.”

— Mary McCarthy

80. “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

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

— Mary McCarthy

82. “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.”

— Mary McCarthy

83. “If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.”

— Mary McCarthy

84. “The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.”

— Mary McCarthy

85. “Like Michelangelo and Cellini, Florentines of every station are absorbed in acquiring real estate: a little apartment that can be rented to foreigners; a farm that will supply the owner with oil, wine, fruit, and flowers for the house.”

— Mary McCarthy

86. “All I knew that night was that I believed in something and couldn’t express it, while your team believed in nothing but knew how to say it – in other men’s words.”

— Mary McCarthy

87. “Making love, we are all more alike than we are when we are talking or acting.”

— Mary McCarthy

88. “I understand what you are feeling,” he said. “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

89. “The furniture and trappings in the apartment are all in a state of flux – here today, gone tomorrow. Nothing is anchored to its place, not even the coffee-pot, which floats off and returns, on the tide of the signora’s marine nature.”

— Mary McCarthy

90. “The present can try to bury the past, an operation that is most atrocious when it is most successful.”

— Mary McCarthy

91. “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.”

— Mary McCarthy

92. “For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.”

— Mary McCarthy

93. “It was the cocktail hour in Priss’s room at New York Hospital – terribly gay.”

— Mary McCarthy

94. “When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans.”

— Mary McCarthy

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

— Mary McCarthy

96. “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 all too much a professional air.”

— Mary McCarthy

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

— Mary McCarthy

98. “The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers; suspicion is reserved for friends.”

— Mary McCarthy

99. “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.”

— Mary McCarthy

100. “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.”

— Mary McCarthy