“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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“Why is Melancholy like Honey? Because it is very sweet, and it is culled from Flowers.”
― Hope Mirrlees, quote from Lud-in-the-Mist
“This is what happiness is, past the rubbish of its overuse as a word, past the cracked gloss of the letters that mean nothing when strung together. They mean something now, and I know what it’s like when you and someone else are right together. How simple it is, and how amazing.”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from The Unwritten Rule
“Oh, you’ve got a sweet voice, baby, such a sad sad sweet voice, I’d like to fuck you, I thought.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from The Most Beautiful Woman in Town & Other Stories
“When I write, I can be heard. And known. But nobody has to look at me. Nobody has to see me at all.”
― Nora Raleigh Baskin, quote from Anything But Typical
“Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth.” But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations—to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess. This imagining process is so difficult that there is a division of labor in physics: there are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce, and guess at new laws, but do not experiment; and then there are experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and guess.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher
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