It was getting rather alarming. I realised one day that in twenty four hours I had slept with three different men. And one morning I was in bed with … - Mary McCarthy

The clamor of agreement betrayed the anti-French sentiment ever ready to be mobilized when Americans in Paris got together. And as happened with anti-Semites merrily fraternizing, nobody at the table seemed to remember that there were French people present.

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.

[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.