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

„Ecco, io ero un ammasso ambulante di bugie: fingevo di essere cattolica e andavo a confessarmi, mentre in realtà avevo perduto la fede; fingevo di avere i miei periodi mensili e mi tagliavo apposta con le forbici delle unghie…“

—  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)

„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.

„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.

„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

„If only one could … But it required strength. The romantic life had been too hard for her. In morals as in politics anarchy is not for the weak. The small state, racked by internal dissension, invites the foreign conqueror. Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.“

—  Mary McCarthy

The dictator is also the scapegoat; in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt; and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance.
First published in Harper's Bazaar (April 1942)
Origine: The Company She Keeps (1942), Ch. 6 "Ghostly Father, I Confess", p. 184.

„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.“

—  Mary McCarthy

Origine: How I Grew (1987), Ch. 9, last lines of book

„When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you. It works, I guarantee you, this sure-fire guilt-eradicator, like a homeopathic medicine — like in small doses applied to like. It works, but I am not sure that it is a good thing.“

—  Mary McCarthy

Origine: How I Grew (1987), Ch. 6

„He had the true American taste for argument, argument as distinguished from conversation on the one hand and from oratory on the other. The long-drawn-out, meandering debate was, perhaps, the only art form he understood or relished, and this was natural since the argument is in a sense our only indigenous folk-art, and it is not the poet but the silver-tongued lawyer who is our real national bard.“

—  Mary McCarthy

Origine: The Company She Keeps (1942), Ch. 5 "Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man", p. 141

„The discovery that one cannot convince an opponent and that it is hopeless to go on trying involves a confession of subjectivity that deprives the world of meaning.“

—  Mary McCarthy, libro The Oasis

Origine: The Oasis (1949), p. 253

„From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people, and I do not mean this as a paradox, but simply as an observable fact. Only good people can afford to be religious. For the others it is too great a temptation — a temptation to the deadly sins of pride and anger, chiefly, but one might also add sloth.“

—  Mary McCarthy, libro Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

"To the Reader"
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957)