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 Il gruppo , 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
„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.“
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.“
"Up the Ladder from Charm to Vogue", p. 185
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)
„In violence, we forget who we are.“
"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.“
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“
"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?“
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."“
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.“
"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
„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)