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.
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scrittrice statunitenseFrasi Mary McCarthy
„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
„In violence, we forget who we are.“
— Mary McCarthy
"Characters in Fiction", p. 276. First published in Partisan Review (March 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 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
Ch. 2
„It was getting rather alarming. I realised one day that in twenty four hours I had slept with three different men. And one morning I was in bed with somebody while over his head I talked on the telephone with somebody else…I did not feel promiscuous. Maybe no-one does. And maybe more girls sleep with more men than you would ever think to look at them.“
— Mary McCarthy
Ch. 2
