Yet friendship, I believe, is essential to intellectuals. It is probably the growth hormone the mind requires as it begins its activity of producing and exchanging ideas. 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. In the course of my history, not love or marriage so much as friendship has promoted growth.

Mary McCarthy

Categorized in : Believe Friendship Growth Hormones

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

Mary McCarthy

positive-attitude hero life

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

Mary McCarthy

writing funny lying

most people did not care to be taught what they did not already know; it made them feel ignorant.

Mary McCarthy

learning education people

We are the hero of our own story.

Mary McCarthy

inspirational-life self-esteem hero

The idea of Macbeth as a conscience-torm ented man is a platitude as false as Macbeth himself. Macbeth has no conscience. His main concern throughout the play is that most selfish of all concerns: to get a good night's sleep.

Mary McCarthy

selfish good-night sleep

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

Mary McCarthy

bad-decision realistic decision

You know what my favourite quotation is?.. It's from Chaucer... Criseyde says it, "I am myne owene woman, wel at ese."

Mary McCarthy

chaucer favourite knows

Illiteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do.

Mary McCarthy

alarms levels doe

From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people.

Mary McCarthy

good-people driven people

Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships - someone always wins.

Mary McCarthy

real winning silly

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

Mary McCarthy

modern libertarian liberty

Our language, once homely and colloquial, seeks to aggrandize our meanest activities with polysyllabic terms or it retreats from frankness into a stammering verbosity.

Mary McCarthy

stammering retreat language

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

Mary McCarthy

plums cake real

In violence, we forget who we are

Mary McCarthy

domestic-violence who-we-are war

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

Mary McCarthy

perception truth happiness

In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.

Mary McCarthy

equality literature science

... it was religion that saved me. Our ugly church and parochial school provided me with my only aesthetic outlet, in the words ofthe Mass and the litanies and the old Latin hymns, in the Easter lilies around the altar, rosaries, ornamented prayer books, votive lamps, holy cards stamped in gold and decorated with flower wreaths and a saint's picture.

Mary McCarthy

easter prayer latin

Others are to us like the characters in fiction, eternal and incorrigible; the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been predictable and unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves.

Mary McCarthy

personality giving character

Understanding is often a prelude to forgiveness, but they are not the same, and we often forgive what we cannot understand (seeing nothing else to do) and understand what we cannot pardon.

Mary McCarthy

forgiving political understanding

It is impossible, except for theologians, to conceive of a world-wide scandal or a universe-wide scandal; the proof of this is the way people have settled down to living with nuclear fission, radiation poisoning, hydrogen bombs, satellites, and space rockets.

Mary McCarthy

hydrogen-bomb space people