Mary McCarthy Quotes - Page 6

Quotes about:

• this is the spirit of the enchantment under which Venice lies, pearly and roseate, like the Sleeping Beauty, changeless throughout the centuries, arrested, while the concrete forest of the modern world grows up around her.

  Mary McCarthy

  Growing Up, Lying, Sleep

  Mary McCarthy (1956). “Venice observed”

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Mary McCarthy

  Tree, Mind, Age

  4 Copy quote

• America is indeed a revelation, though not quite the one that was planned. Given a clean slate, man, it was hoped, would write the future. Instead, he has written his past.

  Mary McCarthy

  Writing, Past, Men

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

  10 Copy quote

• In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?

  Mary McCarthy

  Class, Humanity, Suffering

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Coffee, Marine, Gone

  Mary McCarthy (1956). “Venice observed”

  6 Copy quote

• 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. It is absolutely useless to look for it, you won't find it, but it's possible in some sense to make it. I don't mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and choose the self you want.

  Mary McCarthy

  Mean, Thinking, Self

  4 Copy quote

• The return to a favorite novel is generally tied up with changes in oneself that must be counted as improvements, but have the feel of losses. It is like going back to a favorite house, country, person; nothing is where it belongs, including one's heart.

  Mary McCarthy

  Country, Book, Reading

  Mary McCarthy (1985). “Occasional prose”, Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• 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”

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Sports, Art, Hunting

  Mary McCarthy (1956). “Venice observed”

  7 Copy quote

• Old money is fully as moronic as new money but it has inherited an appearance of cultivation.

  Mary McCarthy

  Appearance, Cultivation, Old Money

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  History, House, Nonchalance

  Mary McCarthy (2002). “A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays”, New York Review of Books

  7 Copy quote

Page 6 of 6

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

5

6

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin