Mary McCarthy Quotes

Combativeness was, I suppose, the dominant trait in my grandmother’s nature. An aggressive churchgoer, she was quite without Christian feeling; the mercy of the Lord Jesus had never entered her heart. Her piety was an act of war against the Protestant ascendancy […] articles attacking birth control, divorce, mixed marriages, Darwin and secular education were her favourite reading. The teachings of the Church did not interest her, except as they were a rebuke to others […] The extermination of Protestantism, rather than spiritual perfection, was the boon she prayed for.

I do not mind if I lose my soul for all eternity. If the kind of God exists Who would damn me for not working out a deal with Him, then that is unfortunate. I should not care to spend eternity in the company of such a person.

To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people, and I do not mean this as a paradox, but simply as an observable fact. Only good people can afford to be religious. For the others it is too great a temptation — a temptation to the deadly sins of pride and anger, chiefly, but one might also add sloth.

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.

Casanova had the true Venetian temperament: cool, ebullient, and licentious. […] This absence of passion no doubt contributes to the unreal character of Venetian life, which appears as a shimmering surface, like Venetian music. In the traditional Venetian serenades, played from cruising gondolas, the songs today are all Neapolitan. Foreigners cavil at this, but the Venetians point out that there are no love songs in the Venetian repertory — only witty exchanges between man and maiden.

St Mary of Egypt […] has, by the way, two qualifications for being a Venetian saint — first, she was a courtesan, and, second, when she died, her remains were buried by a pious lion.

The Venetians invented the income tax, statistical science, the floating of government stock, state censorship of books, anonymous denunciations (the Bocca del Leone), the gambling casino, and the Ghetto.

The Florentines, who were incapable of ruling themselves, produced a great theorist of government: Machiavelli. The Venetians had no theorists and evolved a model Republic.

Sophistication, that modern kind of sophistication that begs to differ, to be paradoxical, to invert, is not a possible attitude in Venice. In time, this becomes the beauty of the place. One gives up the struggle and submits to a classic experience. One accepts the fact that what one is about to feel or say has not only been said before by Goethe or Musset but is on the tip of the tongue of the tourist from Iowa who is alighting in the Piazzetta with his wife in her furpiece and jeweled pin. Those Others, the existential enemy, are here identical with oneself.

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.

The rationalist mind has always had its doubts about Venice. The watery city receives a dry inspection, as though it were a myth for the credulous — poets and honeymooners.

You act as if the human race had learned nothing, as if everything were possible, as if we could all start on a new phase every day. Or a new wife. It's all the same. You take up a doubting posture. But you don't really doubt. You just ask questions, like a machine." Her voice rose, in slight hysteria. Warren looked at her in consternation. "Forgive me," she put in. "But it's true. And the whole world is getting like you, like New Leeds. Everybody has to be shown. 'How do you know that?' every moron asks the philosopher when he is told that this is an apple and that is a pear. He pretends to doubt, to be curious. But nobody is really curious because nobody cares what the truth is. As soon as we think something, it occurs to us that the opposite or the contrary might just as well be true. And no one cares.

She felt as though she were present, against her will, at an interminable discussion […] with captious voices pleading, "Explain to me, why not? Give me one reason why not." The medieval temptations, with all the allures of gluttony and concupiscence could not, Martha thought, have been half so trying as the sheer dentist-drill boredom of listening to the arguments of the devil as a modern quasi-intellectual.

[P]ity was very unreliable, as a guide to conduct. It signified a conquered repugnance.