All Mary McCarthy Quotes
Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a "work" of man.
Mary McCarthy
62% of people like this quote
Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret.
Mary McCarthy
60% of people like this quote
The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.
Mary McCarthy
59% of people like this quote
The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.
Mary McCarthy
58% of people like this quote
I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets.
Mary McCarthy
56% of people like this quote
You musn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.
Mary McCarthy
56% of people like this quote
The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the brother of talk after dinner.
Mary McCarthy
55% of people like this quote
In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.
Mary McCarthy
54% of people like this quote
I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that you really must make the self.
Mary McCarthy
54% of people like this quote
The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air.
Mary McCarthy
53% of people like this quote
Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.
Mary McCarthy
53% of people like this quote
The labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that never finishes, toil that has to be begun again the moment it is completed, toil that is destroyed and consumed by the life process.
Mary McCarthy
52% of people like this quote
People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.
Mary McCarthy
52% of people like this quote
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