Mary McCarthy Quotes

Life for the European is a career; for the American, it is a hazard.

If someone tells you he is going to make "a realistic decision," you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.

If only one could … But it required strength. The romantic life had been too hard for her. In morals as in politics anarchy is not for the weak. The small state, racked by internal dissension, invites the foreign conqueror. Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility. The dictator is also the scapegoat; in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt; and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance.

She did not recommend sacrifice, having meekly given up her job and her social ideals for Sloan's sake. It was now too late, because of Stephen, but she was convinced she had made a mistake. Sloan would be far happier if she were where she longed to be — in Washington as a humble cog in the New Deal, which he hated — and he could boast of 'my Bolshevik wife.' He had been proud of her when she was with the N.R.A., because she had had gumption, and now even that was gone.

Making exceptions was usually a poor idea, he found; it was the same principle as 'Just one won't hurt you.'

Among Venice's spells is one of peculiar potency: the power to awaken the philistine dozing in the skeptic's breast. People of this kind — dry, prose people of superior intelligence — object to feeling what they are supposed to feel, in the presence of marvels. They wish to feel something else. The extreme of this position is to feel nothing.

It struck him that the closer Nature got to the human, the uglier it could be. You could hardly find a plant that was not beautiful, even in a strange mottled way, but there were plenty of hideous simians.

At home I never thought I was much of a conformist. But I now see that I was without knowing it. I did what everybody else did without being aware I was copying them. Here I mind being different. Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.

When I go it will have to be by gondola because I have so much baggage. Some private Charon of the signora's will ferry me down to the station in his shabby funeral bark. That is how the Allies took Venice, arriving from the mainland, at the end of the second World War. There was a petrol shortage, and the Allied command, having made secret contact with the gondoliers' co-operative, officially 'captured' Venice with a fleet of gondolas. Even war in Venice evokes a disbelieving smile.

I still know when I lie, I can recognize a frame-up when I make one. But Frederick is his own stooge, his own innocent front. He has a vested interest in himself. He is the perfect Protestant pragmatist. 'If I say this, it is true,' 'If I do this, it is justified.' There is no possibility of dispute because Frederick has grace, Frederick belongs to the Elect. It's the religion of the Pharisee, the religion of the businessman.

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. Of course I envied you that too.

[T]he whole concept of transcendence […] was very close to my heart, the concept that man is more than his circumstances, more even than himself.

An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished equation.

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

The essence of Vassar is mythic. Today, despite much competition, it still figures in the public mind as the archetypal woman's college. […] It signifies a certain je ne sais quoi; a whiff of luxury and the ineffable; plain thinking and high living. […] For different people, in fact, at different periods, Vassar can stand for whatever is felt to be wrong with the modern female: humanism, atheism, Communism, short skirts, cigarettes, psychiatry, votes for women, free love, intellectualism. Pre-eminently among American college women, the Vassar girl is thought of as carrying a banner. The inscription on it varies with the era or with the ideas of the beholder and in the final sense does not matter — the flushed cheek and tensed arm are what count.