Мэри Маккарти цитаты

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„Секс не может заменить вам любви, а любовь не может заменить секса…“

„Хэппи-энд — вот наша национальная религия.“

„Все мы — герои своих романов.“

„Женщина умнее мужчины, и свой ум она расходует прежде всего на то, чтобы мужчина этого не заметил.“

„Один интервьюер попросил меня назвать книгу, в которой лучше всего изображена современная американская женщина. Единственный ответ, который пришел мне в голову: «Госпожа Бовари».“

„Если обещано «реалистическое решение» — жди какой-нибудь неприятности.“

“Combativeness was, I suppose, the dominant trait in my grandmother’s nature. An aggressive churchgoer, she was quite without Christian feeling; the mercy of the Lord Jesus had never entered her heart. Her piety was an act of war against the Protestant ascendancy […] articles attacking birth control, divorce, mixed marriages, Darwin and secular education were her favourite reading. The teachings of the Church did not interest her, except as they were a rebuke to others […] The extermination of Protestantism, rather than spiritual perfection, was the boon she prayed for.”

“It was getting rather alarming. I realised one day that in twenty four hours I had slept with three different men. And one morning I was in bed with somebody while over his head I talked on the telephone with somebody else…I did not feel promiscuous. Maybe no-one does. And maybe more girls sleep with more men than you would ever think to look at them.”

“You know what my favourite quotation is? […] It’s from Chaucer […] Criseyde says it, "I am myne owene woman, wel at ese."”

“Judas was not a monster, though his act was monstrous; he was a man, the twelfth part of humanity, and his sin was that he could betray for thirty pieces of silver, like any common informer. Jesus was uncommon, not Judas.”

“People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.”

“I combine concrete cynicism with a sort of vague optimism.”

“I was able to compare the sexual equipment of the various men I made love with and there were amazing differences, in both length and massiveness. One handsome married man, who used to arrive with two Danishes from a very good bakery, had a penis about the size and shape of a lead pencil; he shall remain nameless. In my experience there was usually a relation to height, as Philip Rahv and Bill Mangold, both tall men, bore out. There may be dwarfish men with monstrously large organs, but I have never known one. It was not until later, after my second divorce, that I met an impotent man or a pervert (two of the latter)… None of my partners, the reader will be relieved to hear, had a venereal disease.”

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

“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.”

“To be disesteemed by people you don’t have much respect for is not the worst fate.”

“[B]ureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.”

“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.”

“[T]he 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.”

“To marry a man without loving him, which was what I had just done, not really perceiving it, was a wicked action, I saw. Stiff with remorse and terror, I lay under the thin blanket through a good part of the night; as far as I could tell from what seemed a measureless distance, my untroubled mate was sleeping.”

“A good deal of education consists of unlearning — the breaking of bad habits, as with a tennis serve. This was emphatically true of a Vassar education: where other colleges aimed at development, bringing out what was already there like a seed waiting to sprout, Vassar remade a girl. Vassar was transformational.”

“About truth I have always been monotheistic. It has been an article of faith with me, going back to college days, that there is a truth and that it is knowable.”

“Nobody in this land, certainly no Christian, can accept hating on a full-time basis; it is apt to reflect back on the hater.”

“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.”

“You never learn a language unless you use it.”

“Idealists, I know, are dangerous, but the claim of the ideal (Ibsen) has to be felt or else…. Or else the world, our deteriorating world, will continue on its course by sheer inertia. Inertia is taking over, right here; you can sense it.”

“It struck him that the closer Nature got to the human, the uglier it could be. You could hardly find a plant that was not beautiful, even in a strange mottled way, but there were plenty of hideous simians.”

“Ars longa vita brevis est was a truth that could not be argued with in the Eternal City.”

“The clamor of agreement betrayed the anti-French sentiment ever ready to be mobilized when Americans in Paris got together. And as happened with anti-Semites merrily fraternizing, nobody at the table seemed to remember that there were French people present.”

“If you want to be your own master, his father used to say, always be surprised by evil; never anticipate it.”

“At home I never thought I was much of a conformist. But I now see that I was without knowing it. I did what everybody else did without being aware I was copying them. Here I mind being different. Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.”

“Maybe any action becomes cowardly once you stop to reason about it. Conscience doth make cowards of us all, eh mamma mia?”

“Yet it was part of being an American that, once you got started, you felt impelled to tell all the people all the truth all the time.”

“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.”

“Polly saw the point. Would she wish not to have been born? Unhappy as she was, she could not say that. Even when she had wished to die, she had not wished never to have been born. Nobody alive could do that.”