Frasi di Mary McCarthy

„Chi è nato e cresciuto cattolico ha assorbito, prima dei dodici anni, una buona parte della storia universale e di quella delle idee. Ed è proprio come imparare una lingua straniera in tenera età: l'effetto è indelebile.“

—  Mary McCarthy

Ricordi di un'educazione cattolica

„A me non dispiace di essere stata cattolica, anzitutto per motivi pratici: ho acquistato una certa conoscenza della lingua latina, dei santi e delle loro vite, e non tutti hanno questa fortuna.“

—  Mary McCarthy

Ricordi di un'educazione cattolica

„Come cattolica che ha abbandonato la sua religione, io, dopo tutto, non mi lascio turbare dalla possibilità che Dio esista. Se esiste (il che sembra più che dubbio), nel mondo futuro io mi troverò nei guai; ma non per questo intendo venire a patti con la mia coscienza e credere in Dio allo scopo di salvarmi l'anima.“

—  Mary McCarthy

Ricordi di un'educazione cattolica

„Nonostante il mio ateismo gustavo moltissimo le funzioni religiose, il mattino e la sera, nella cappella della scuola. Mi piacevano gli inni e le litanie, mi piaceva ascoltare la nostra Preside declamare i salmi al cadere della notte.“

—  Mary McCarthy

Ricordi di un'educazione cattolica

„Non mi importa se perdo la mia anima per l'eternità. Se esiste una specie di Dio tale da condannarmi perché non ho stretto un patto con Lui, pazienza! Non ci tengo affatto a passare l'eternità in compagnia di una persona del genere.“

—  Mary McCarthy

Ricordi di un'educazione cattolica

„La religione cattolica è fra tutte le religioni (della maomettana non so nulla) la più pericolosa dal punto di vista morale, perché pretende di essere la sola vera e, quindi, coltiva nei suoi adepti quella coscienza di un privilegio: l'idea, cioè, che non tutti hanno la fortuna di essere cattolici.“

—  Mary McCarthy

Ricordi di un'educazione cattolica

„Pregare Dio che mi fornisse argomenti a sostegno dell'ateismo (ma era proprio cosi?) per me tredicenne significava solamente sfidare la sua severità. Che fare?“

—  Mary McCarthy

Ricordi di un'educazione cattolica

„A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.“

—  Mary McCarthy

"Up the Ladder from Charm to Vogue", p. 185
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

„We are the hero of our own story.“

—  Mary McCarthy

„In violence, we forget who we are.“

—  Mary McCarthy

"Characters in Fiction", p. 276. First published in Partisan Review (March 1961)
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

„I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you’re older, I think, is that — how to express this — you really must make the self.“

—  Mary McCarthy

Interview by Elisabeth Niebuhr in "The Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work, Second Series" (1963) [the interview took place in March 1961]
Contesto: I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you’re older, I think, is that — how to express this — you really must make the self. It's absolutely useless to look for it, you won’t find it, but it’s possible in some sense to make it.

„Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty; it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils“

—  Mary McCarthy

"The Hue and Cry," The Writing on the Wall (1970)
Contesto: Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty; it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils (“a person of inhuman and horrible cruelty or wickedness,” OED, Sense 4). Such an unnatural being is more horrible to contemplate than an Eichmann — that is, aesthetically worse — but morally an Ilse Koch was surely less culpable than Eichmann since she seems to have had no trace of human feeling and therefore was impassable to conscience.

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

—  Mary McCarthy

Origine: Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975

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

—  Mary McCarthy

First published in Partisan Review (July-August 1941)
Origine: The Company She Keeps (1942), Ch. 3 "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt", p. 70.

„[I]n science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.“

—  Mary McCarthy

"The Fact in Fiction", p. 266. First published in Partisan Review (Summer 1960)
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

„When Henry Mulcahy, a middle-aged instructor of literature at Jocelyn College, Jocelyn, Pennsylvania, unfolded the President's letter and became aware of its contents, he gave a sudden sharp cry of impatience and irritation, as if such interruptions could positively be brooked no longer.“

—  Mary McCarthy, libro The Groves of Academe

Origine: The Groves of Academe (1952), Ch. I, p. 293, first lines of novel

„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.“

—  Mary McCarthy, libro Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

Origine: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), Ch. 1

„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.“

—  Mary McCarthy

Origine: Intellectual Memoirs: New York 1936–1938 (1992), Ch. 2

„You mustn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.“

—  Mary McCarthy, libro The Group

Dottie in Ch. 2
The Group (1963)