Mary Mccarthy

We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.

The exile is a singular, whereas refugees tend to be thought of in the mass ... What is implied in these nuances of social standing is the respect we pay to choice. The exile appears to have made a decision, while the refugee is the very image of helplessness.

Every word she writes is a lie, including "and" and "the."

Anti-Semitism is a horrible disease from which nobody is immune, and it has a kind of evil fascination that makes an enlightened person draw near the source of infection, supposedly in a scientific spirit, but really to sniff the vapors and dally with the possibility.

If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.

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.

You mustn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.

The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof

Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.

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. It is absolutely useless to look for it, you won't find it, but it's possible in some sense to make it. I don't mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and choose the self you want.

Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.

If someone tells you he is going to make a 'realistic decision', you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.

There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.