“One of the big features of living alone was that you could talk to yourself all you wanted and address imaginary audiences, running the gamut of emotion.”
― Mary McCarthy, quote from The Group
“If [she] had come to prefer the company of odd ducks, it was possibly because they had no conception of oddity, or rather, they thought you were odd if you weren't.”
― Mary McCarthy, quote from The Group
“I understand what you are feeling,” he said. “As Socrates showed, love cannot be anything else but the love of the good. But to find the good is very rare. That is why love is rare, in spite of what people think. It happens to one in a thousand, and to that one it is a revelation. No wonder he cannot communicate with the other nine hundred and ninety-nine.”
― Mary McCarthy, quote from The Group
“Love had done this to her, for the second time. Love was bad for her. There must be certain people who were allergic to love, and she was one of them. Not only was it bad for her; it made her bad; it poisoned her. Before she knew him, not only had she been far, far happier but she had been nicer. Loving him was turning her into an awful person, a person she hated.”
― Mary McCarthy, quote from The Group
“You mustn’t force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex—that’s quite a thought, isn’t it?”
― Mary McCarthy, quote from The Group
“She decided she wanted a cool, starchy independent life, with ruffles of humor like window curtains.”
― Mary McCarthy, quote from The Group
“He was a thoroughly bad hat, then, but that was the kind, of course, that nice women broke their hearts over.”
― Mary McCarthy, quote from The Group
“He would have been far more attractive to her if she could have trusted him. You could not love a man who was always playing hide-and-seek with you; that was the lesson she had learned.”
― Mary McCarthy, quote from The Group
“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.”
― Mary McCarthy, quote from The Group
“Elinor was always firmly convinced of other people’s hypocrisy since she could not believe that they noticed less than she did.”
― Mary McCarthy, quote from The Group
“It came to her that he was going to leave without making love to her. This would mean they had made love for the last time this morning. But that did not count: this morning they did not know it was for the last time. When the door shut behind him, she still could not believe it. "It can't end like this," she said to herself over and over, drumming with her knuckles on her mouth to keep from screaming.”
― Mary McCarthy, quote from The Group
“I mean exactly that,” Mr. Davison retorted. “You’ve hit the nail smack on the head. We pay a price for having money. People in my position”—he turned to Kay—“have ‘privilege.’ That’s what I read in the Nation and the New Republic.” Mrs. Davison nodded. “Good,” said Mr. Davison. “Now listen. The fellow who’s got privilege gives up some rights or ought to.”
― Mary McCarthy, quote from The Group
“The group was not afraid of being radical either; they could see the good Roosevelt was doing, despite what Mother and Dad said; they were not taken in by party labels and thought the Democrats should be given a chance to show what they had up their sleeve.”
― Mary McCarthy, quote from The Group
“It was the cocktail hour in Priss’s room at New York Hospital—terribly gay.”
― Mary McCarthy, quote from The Group
“But this poor chap is a dangerous neurotic.” Polly laughed. “So you saw that, Father. I never could. He always seemed so normal.” “It’s the same thing,” said her father, putting the groceries away. “All neurotics are petty bourgeois. And vice versa. Madness is too revolutionary for them. They can’t go the whole hog. We madmen are the aristocrats of mental illness. You could never marry that fellow, my dear.”
― Mary McCarthy, quote from The Group
“You have to live without love, learn not to need it in order to live with it.”
― Mary McCarthy, quote from The Group
Mary McCarthy
Born place: in Seattle, Washington, The United States
Born date June 21, 1912
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“Have a smile for breakfast, you'll be shitting joy by lunch.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold
“Opet sam sam. Možda je i najbolje tako, ne očekuješ pomoć i ne bojiš se izdaje. Sam. Učinit ću sve što mogu, ne uzdajući se u podršku koje nema, i onda je moje sve što postignem, i zlo i dobro.”
― Meša Selimović, quote from Death and the Dervish
“I saw the Old Moon with the New Moon in her arms, hovering above a row of poplars. The”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from Nine Princes in Amber
“...making some noise in the woods is a thing that one can forget. The sound of a man’s voice on the other hand, is something else entirely.”
― Angelo Tsanatelis, quote from Origins
“Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if we will risk it on the precipice.
He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying.”
― G.K. Chesterton, quote from Orthodoxy
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