Mary McCarthy Quotes About Character

Quotes about: Character

• 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

  Character, Giving, Personality

  Mary McCarthy (1964). “The Humanist in the Bathtub”

• 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

  Character, Eye, Air

  "America the Beautiful". Commentary Magazine, September 1947.

• The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is the fact that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable. ... No nation with any sense of material well-being would endure the food we eat, the cramped apartments we live in, the noise, the traffic, the crowded subways and buses. American life, in large cities, at any rate, is a perpetual assault on the senses and the nerves.

  Mary McCarthy

  Life, Character, Cities

  "On the contrary".

• If you talked or laughed in church, told lies, had impure thoughts or conversations, you were bad; if you obeyed your parents or guardians, went to confession and communion regularly, said prayers for the dead, you were good.

  Mary McCarthy

  Prayer, Lying, Character

  Mary McCarthy (1975). “The company she keeps”, Not Avail

• I once started a detective story to make money—but I couldn't get the murder to take place! At the end of three chapters I was still describing the characters and the milieu, so I thought, this is not going to work. No corpse!

  Mary McCarthy

  Character, Three, Stories

• Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.

  Mary McCarthy

  Sex, Character, Space

  Mary McCarthy (1964). “The humanist in the bathtub”

• 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.

  Mary McCarthy

  Character, Views, Argument

  Mary McCarthy (1961). “On the contrary”, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy

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