Mary McCarthy

Quotes

1. She [Polly] did not approve of revolutions, unless they were absolutely necessary, and she thought it peculiar, to say the least, that her father and his friends were eager to make revolutions in democratic countries like France or the United States instead of concentrating on Hitler and Mussolini, who ought to be overthrown. Of course, as her father said, it was pretty hopeless to make a revolution against Hitler for the time being, since the workers' parties had all been suppressed; still, it seemed rather unfair to penalize Roosevelt and Blum for not being Hitler. Fair play, replied her father, was a bourgeois concept and did not apply against the class enemy.

2. 

   They got into the car. This time Lakey drove. Listening to Harald's wild talk had disgusted her; she concluded that he was utterly specious. She was ashamed of the curiosity she had felt about him. To be curious about someone opened you to contamination from them. But she was still determined to play him a trick, to take revenge for Kay, for women, and most of all for the impudence of his associating himself with her.

3. 

   [Y]ou have to live without love, learn not to need it, in order to live with it.

4. 

   It was June, 1933, one week after Commencement, when Kay Leiland Strong, Vassar '33, the first of her class to run around the table at the Class Day dinner, was married to Harald Petersen, Reed '27, in the chapel of St. George's Church, P.E., Karl F. Reiland, Rector.

5. 

   If only one could … But it required strength. The romantic life had been too hard for her. In morals as in politics anarchy is not for the weak. The small state, racked by internal dissension, invites the foreign conqueror. Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility. The dictator is also the scapegoat; in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt; and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance.

   p. 184

6. 

   He would only come if she were unprepared. Or would he come only if she were prepared? With her lamp trimmed like the wise virgins? Christianity would tell her to buy food for two, but the pagans would say, 'Don't risk it.'

7. 

   He had the true American taste for argument, argument as distinguished from conversation on the one hand and from oratory on the other. The long-drawn-out, meandering debate was, perhaps, the only art form he understood or relished, and this was natural since the argument is in a sense our only indigenous folk-art, and it is not the poet but the silver-tongued lawyer who is our real national bard.

   p. 141

8. 

   She did not recommend sacrifice, having meekly given up her job and her social ideals for Sloan's sake. It was now too late, because of Stephen, but she was convinced she had made a mistake. Sloan would be far happier if she were where she longed to be — in Washington as a humble cog in the New Deal, which he hated — and he could boast of 'my Bolshevik wife.' He had been proud of her when she was with the N.R.A., because she had had gumption, and now even that was gone.

9. 

   When we pass from "I ought to do this" to "You think I ought to do this," it seems to us at first that we have weakened the imperative; actually, by externalizing it, we have made it unanswerable, for it is only ourselves that we can come to terms with.

   p. 147

10. 

    Extend your antennae, girls.

11. 

    She could not bear to hurt her husband. She impressed this on the Young Man, on her confidantes, and finally on her husband himself. The thought of Telling Him actually made her heart turn over in a sudden and sickening way, she said. This was true, and yet she knew that being a potential divorcee was deeply pleasurable in somewhat the same way that being an engaged girl had been.

    p. 5

12. 

    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. Of course I envied you that too.