Frasi di Mary McCarthy
Mary McCarthy
Data di nascita: 21. Giugno 1912
Data di morte: 25. Ottobre 1989
Altri nomi:Mary McCarthyová,Mary Therese McCarthy
Mary McCarthy è stata una scrittrice statunitense.
Studiò al Vassar College di Poughkeepsie, nello stato di New York e, dopo la laurea, iniziò subito a collaborare con le riviste The Nation e New Republic, per poi redigere articoli di critica teatrale sulla rivista Partisan Review.
La sua prima antologia di racconti, The Company She Keeps, fu acclamato dalla critica come un successo. Degna di nota è anche l'autobiografia Ricordi di un'educazione cattolica , analisi critica della società americana del suo tempo, soprattutto del periodo della guerra fredda.
Ebbe un certo successo anche The Group, disincantata e spregiudicata storia di un gruppo di amiche, da quando erano studentesse a quando diventarono donne. Nel 1984 le fu assegnata la Medaglia Edward MacDowell, riconoscimento in ambito letterario.
Frasi Mary McCarthy
„In violence, we forget who we are.“
— Mary McCarthy
"Characters in Fiction," Partisan Review (March/April 1961)
„Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty; it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils“
— Mary McCarthy
Context: 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.
"The Hue and Cry," The Writing on the Wall (1970)
„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
Context: 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.
Interview by Elisabeth Niebuhr in "The Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work, Second Series" (1963) [the interview took place in March 1961]
„What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?“
— Mary McCarthy, Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975
„I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.“
— Mary McCarthy
Commenting on her novel The Group. New York Herald Tribune (5 January 1964)
