Mary Mccarthy Quotes

He says it was tourists being careless, where I see a fiendishly clever murder attempt.” “Mr. McCarthy, you’d better explain.” “Patrick, please. You’ll be tempted to laugh. It was a banana skin.

We are the hero of our own story.

Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’." (on Lillian Hellman)

If you had to say something definitive about the world in a single sentence what would that sentence be? It would be this: the world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.

What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?

Rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. All the rest is grief.

Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.

In violence we forget who we are.

If the world itself is a horror then there is nothing to fix and the only thing you could be protected from would be the contemplation of it.

I think our time is up. I know. Hold my hand. Hold your hand? Yes. I want you to. All right. Why? Because that’s what people do when they’re waiting for the end of something.

When all trace of our existence is gone, for whom then will this be a tragedy?

Nobody comes with names. You give them names so that you can find them in the dark.

I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand.

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?

The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.

We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words you are the hero of your own story.

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.

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.

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

I would like to belong but I dont.

A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.

You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk.

I'm not really concerned about what other people believe. I dont consider them qualified to have an opinion.

At what age in a child’s life does rage become sorrow?

Music is made out of nothing but some fairly simple rules . . . The notes themselves amount to almost nothing. But why some particular arrangement of these notes should have such a profound effect on our emotions is a mystery beyond even the hope of comprehension.

I gave up apologizing for myself a long time ago. What should I say? That I’m sorry to be that which I am? I’d very little to do with it.

Sites that have been host to extraordinary suffering will eventually be either burned to the ground or turned into temples.

The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation.

If you’re sane enough to know that you’re crazy then you’re not as crazy as if you thought you were sane.

People are interested in other people. But your unconscious is not. Or only as they might directly affect you. It’s been hired to do a very specific job. It never sleeps. It’s more faithful than God.

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.

She decided she wanted a cool, starchy independent life, with ruffles of humor like window curtains.

Those who choose a love that can never be fulfilled will be hounded by a rage that can never be extinguished.

No puedes pretender que quien te ama te trate a ti menos cruelmente de lo que se trata a sí mismo. La igualdad en el amor tiene siempre algo de horrible.

If psychosis was was just some synapses misfiring why wouldnt you simply get static?

Host and sorrow to waste as one without distinction until the wretched coagulant is shoveled into the ground at last and the rain primes the stones for fresh tragedies.

We’ve been a long time without a nuclear war. Yes. Well, it’s probably like any bankruptcy. The longer you’re able to put it off the worse it’s going to be. The next great war wont arrive until everyone who remembers the last one is dead.

The more naive your life the more frightening your dreams. Your unconscious will keep trying to wake you. In every sense. Imperilment is bottomless. As long as you are breathing you can always be more scared.

That there is little joy in the world is not just a view of things. Every benevolence is suspect. You finally figure out that the world does not have you in mind. It never did.

Diabolical on the other hand is all but synonymous with ingenious. What Satan had for sale in the garden was knowledge.

Your life is set upon you like a dog.

The elevation of grief to a status transcending that which it sorrows.

This is love. Finally, he understood. This was what made sane men into fools.

I no longer have an opinion about reality. I used to. Now I dont. The first rule of the world is that everything vanishes forever. To the extent that you refuse to accept that then you are living in a fantasy.

In the beginning always was nothing. The novae exploding silently. In total darkness. The stars, the passing comets. Everything at best of alleged being. Black fires. Like the fires of hell. Silence. Nothingness. Night. Black Suns herding the planets through a universe where the concept of space was meaningless for want of any end to it. For want of any concept to stand it against.

I think what is being pointed out is that human consciousness and reality are not the same thing.

And it may even be that in the end all problems are spiritual problems.

He was a thoroughly bad hat, then, but that was the kind, of course, that nice women broke their hearts over.

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.

The days are long but the years are short.

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.

There’s data in the world available only to those who have reached a certain level of wretchedness. You dont know what’s down there if you havent been down there. Joy on the other hand hardly even teaches gratitude. A thoughtful silence.

Because I knew what my brother did not. That there was an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world and there always had been. That at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium. All religions understand this. And it wasnt going away. And that to imagine that the grim eruptions of this century were in any way either singular or exhaustive was simply a folly.

The more noise you make the more likely you are to be eaten. If you’ve no way to escape you keep silent. If birds couldnt fly they wouldnt sing. When you’re defenseless you keep your opinions to yourself.

We're here on a need-to-know basis. There is no machinery in evolution for informing us of the existence of phenomena that do not affect our survival. What is here that we dont know about we dont know about.

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.

You have to live without love, learn not to need it in order to live with it.

You shouldnt worry about what people think of you because they dont do it that often

My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow. Each deeper misery being a state heretofore unimagined. Each suggestive of worse to come.

If you dont know what life is—and you dont—then I’m not sure how you would characterize the absence of it.

The simplest undertaking is predicated upon a future that has no warrant.

Real trouble doesn't begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature. Boredom will drive even quietminded people down paths they never imagined.

The first rule of the world is that everything vanishes forever.

His flexible mind extended to take in his opponent's position and then snapped back like an elastic, with the illusion that it had covered ground.

Do you think it would be easier to treat someone who was delusional or someone who only believed that she was?

And rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. All the rest is grief,

Love is quite possibly a mental disorder itself.

Well. I think maybe it’s harder to lose just one thing than to lose everything.

If mathematical objects exist independently of human thought what else are they independent of? The universe, I suppose. When you solve a problem there is always the compelling sense that the solution was there and that you have discovered it.

If you had to say something definitive about the world in a single sentence what would that sentence be? It would be this: The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.

Talking is just recording what you’re thinking. It’s not the thing itself. When I’m talking to you some separate part of my mind is composing what I’m about to say. But it’s not yet in the form of words. So what is it in the form of? There’s certainly no sense of some homunculus whispering to us the words we’re about to say. Aside from raising the spectre of an infinite regress—as in who is whispering to the whisperer—it raises the question of a language of thought. Part of the general puzzle of how we get from the mind to the world. A hundred billion synaptic events clicking away in the dark like blind ladies

And what do these categories signify? Where did they come from? What does it mean that they are two shades of blue? In my eyes. If music was here before we were, for whom was it here? Schopenhauer says somewhere that if the entire universe should vanish the only thing left would be music.

I thought that I would go to Romania and that when I got there I would go to some small town and buy secondhand clothes in the market. Shoes. A blanket. I’d burn everything I owned. My passport. Maybe I’d just put my clothes in the trash. Change money in the street. Then I’d hike into the mountains. Stay off the road. Take no chances. Crossing the ancestral lands by foot. Maybe by night. There are bears and wolves up there. I looked it up. You could have a small fire at night. Maybe find a cave. A mountain stream. I’d have a canteen for water for when the time came that I was too weak to move about. After a while the water would taste extraordinary. It would taste like music. I’d wrap myself in the blanket at night against the cold and watch the bones take shape beneath my skin and I would pray that I might see the truth of the world before I died. Sometimes at night the animals would come to the edge of the fire and move about and their shadows would move among the trees and I would understand that when the last fire was ashes they would come and carry me away and I would be their eucharist. And that would be my life. And I would be happy.

Supposedly if you could think of nothing good to say about a dullard you would say that he was a good Christian. Diabolical on the other hand is all but synonymous with ingenious. What Satan had for sale in the garden was knowledge.

The dream wakes us to tell us to remember. Maybe there’s nothing to be done. Maybe the question is whether the terror is a warning about the world or about ourselves. The night world from which you are brought upright in your bed gasping and sweating. Are you waking from something you have seen or from something that you are?

Women enjoy a different history of madness. From witchcraft to hysteria we're just bad news. We know that women were condemned as witches because they were mentally unstable but no one has considered the numbers - even few as they might be - of women who were stoned to death for being bright. That I havent wound up chained to a cellar wall or burned at the stake is not a testament to our ascending civility but to our ascending skepticism. If we still believed in witches we'd still be burning them.

and he also told me that I should rethink submitting my thesis. He read your thesis. He read three different drafts of it, actually. Did he understand it? Pretty much. He understood what was wrong with it. And that was? That nobody could understand it.

The next great war wont arrive until everyone who remembers the last one is dead. You think that nuclear war is inevitable. I agree with Plato that only the dead have seen an end to war. And people dont fight with rocks when they have guns. Etcetera and so on.

You dont know what antipsychotics are and you dont know how they work. Or why. All we have finally is the spectacle of tardive dyskinetics feeling their way along the wall. Jerking and drooling and muttering. Of course for those trekking toward the void there are waystations where the news will very suddenly become altogether bleaker. Maybe a sudden chill. There’s data in the world available only to those who have reached a certain level of wretchedness. You dont know what’s down there if you havent been down there.

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

After the 1931 papers it was clear to him that we are capable of mathematical insights that a Universal Truth Machine is not.

Well. I guess what I understand is that at the core of the world of the deranged is the realization that there is another world and that they are not a part of it.

Satan is only interested in your soul. He doesnt give a shit about your welfare otherwise.

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.

Luckily, I am writing a memoir and not a work of fiction, and therefore I do not have to account for my grandmother’s unpleasing character and look for the Oedipal fixation or the traumatic experience which would give her that clinical authenticity that is nowadays so desirable in portraiture.

Some physicists suspect that the theory must eventually arrive at the understanding that the universe itself is a quantum phenomenon. That what quantum mechanics ultimately describes is the universe.

You’re pretty much obliged to reckon that at the last suspiration the dying become not only acceptant of death but dedicated to it. That there must be some epiphany that makes it possible for even the dullest and most deluded of us to accept not only what is unacceptable but unimaginable. The absolute terminus of the world. Which will not wonder even for the briefest second what might have become of us.

At what age in a child’s life does rage become sorrow? I dont know. I dont think Piaget addresses the question. Or why. I think I know why. The injustice over which they are so distraught is irremediable. And rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. All the rest is grief. At some point they get this.

And it was that idea of the divorce between women and power that made Melissa McCarthy’s parodies of the one time White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Saturday Night Live so effective. It was said that these annoyed President Trump more than most satires on his regime, because, according to one of the ‘sources close to him’, ‘he doesn’t like his people to appear weak.’ Decode that, and what it actually means is that he doesn’t like his men to be parodied by and as women. Weakness comes with a female gender.

If you have a patient with a condition that's not understood why not ascribe it to a disorder that is also not understood? Autism occurs in males more than it does in females. So does higher order mathematical intuition. We think: What is this about? Dont know. What is at the heart of it? Dont know. All I can tell you is that I like numbers. I like their shapes and their colors and their smells and the way they taste. And I dont like to take people's word for things.

The unconscious system of guidance is millions of years old, speech less than a hundred thousand. The brain had no idea any of this was coming. The unconscious must have had to do all sorts of scrambling around to accommodate a system that proved perfectly relentless. Not only it is comparable to a parasitic invasion, it’s not comparable to anything else.

Music is made out of nothing but some fairly simple rules. Yet it's true that no one made them up. The rules. The notes themselves amount to almost nothing. But why some particular arrangement of these notes should have such a profound effect on our emotions is a mystery beyond even the hope of comprehension. Music is not a language. it has no reference to anything other than itself

The world you live in is shored up by a collective of agreements. Is that something you think about? The hope is that the truth of the world somehow lies in the common experience of it. Of course the history of science and mathematics and even philosophy is a good bit at odds with this notion. Innovation and discovery by definition war against the common understanding. One should be wary.

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.

But one’s convictions as to the nature of reality must also represent one’s limitations as to the perception of it. And then I just stopped worrying about it. I accepted the fact that I would die without really knowing where it was that I had been and that was okay. Well. Almost.

But music seemed to always stand as an exception to everything. It seemed sacrosanct. Autonomous. Completely self-referential and coherent in every part. If you wanted to describe it as transcendent we could talk about transcendence but we probably wouldnt get very far. I was deeply synesthetic and I thought that if music had an inherent reality—color and taste—that only a few people could identify, then perhaps it had other attributes yet to be discerned. The fact that these things were subjective in no way marked them as imaginary.

It has to do with intelligence. Yes. And again, when you’re talking about intelligence you’re talking about number. A claim that the mathless are quick to frown upon. It’s about calculation and the nature of calculation. Verbal intelligence will only take you so far. There is a wall there, and if you dont understand numbers you wont even see the wall. People from the other side will seem odd to you. And you will never understand the latitude which they extend to you. They will be cordial—or not—depending on their nature. Of course one might also add that intelligence is a basic component of evil. The more stupid you are the less capable you are of doing harm. Except perhaps in a clumsy and inadvertent manner. The word cretin comes from the French chrétien. Supposedly if you could think of nothing good to say about a dullard you would say that he was a good Christian. Diabolical on the other hand is all but synonymous with ingenious. What Satan had for sale in the garden was knowledge.

One of the things I realized was that the universe had been evolving for countless billions of years in total darkness and total silence and that the way that we imagine it is not the way that it was. In the beginning always was nothing. The novae exploding silently. In total darkness. The stars, the passing comets. Everything at best of alleged being. Black fires. Like the fires of hell. Silence. Nothingness. Night. Black suns herding the planets through a universe where the concept of space was meaningless for want of any end to it. For want of any concept to stand it against. And the question once again of the nature of that reality to which there was no witness. All of this until the first living creature possessed of vision agreed to imprint the universe upon its primitive and trembling sensorium and then to touch it with color and movement and memory. It made of me an overnight solipsist and to some extent I am yet.

This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency? The ugliness of American decoration, American entertainment, American literature - is not this the visible expression of the impoverishment of the European masses, a manifestation of all the backwardness, deprivation, and want that arrived here in boatloads from Europe? The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof. The European traveler, viewing with distaste a movie palace or a Motorola, is only looking into the terrible concavity of his continent of hunger inverted startlingly into the convex. Our civilization, deformed as it is outwardly, is still an accomplishment; all this had to come to light.

I would have said that Eichmann was profoundly, egregiously stupid, and for me stupidity is not the same as having a low IQ. Here I rather agree with Kant, that stupidity is caused, not by brain failure, but by a wicked heart. Insensitiveness, opacity, inability to make connections, ofter accompanied by low "animal" cunning. One cannot help feeling that this mental oblivion is chosen, by the heart or the moral will--an active preference, and that explains why one is so irritated by stupidity, which is not the case when one is dealing with a truly backward individual.