Mary McCarthy
People note American writer Mary Therese McCarthy for her sharp literary criticism and satirical fiction, including the novels
The Groves of Academe
(1952) and
The Group
(1963).
McCarthy studied at Vassar college in Poughkeepsie, New York and graduated in 1933. McCarthy moved to city of New York and incisively wrote as a known contributor to publications such as the Nation, the New Republic, and the New York Review of Books. Her debut novel,
The Company She Keeps
(1942), initiated her ascent to the most celebrated writers of her generation; the publication of her autobiography
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
in 1957 bolstered this reputation.
This literary critic authored more than two dozen books, including the now-classic novel
The Group
, the New York Times bestseller in 1963.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McC...
“There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.”
“She considered [her] life, which had not been a life but only a sort of greeting, a Hello There.”
“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.”
“Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’."(on Lillian Hellman)”
“What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?”
“We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words you are the hero of your own story.”
“In violence we forget who we are.”
“A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.”
“We are the hero of our own story.”
“Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.”
“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.”