Frasi di Mary McCarthy
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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. Wikipedia

✵ 21. Giugno 1912 – 25. Ottobre 1989  •  Altri nomi Mary McCarthyová, Mary Therese McCarthy

Mary McCarthy photo

Mary McCarthy: 87 citazioni1 Mi piace

Mary McCarthy frasi celebri

“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

“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…”

Ricordi di un'educazione cattolica

“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.”

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?”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

Ricordi di un'educazione cattolica

Mary McCarthy: Frasi in inglese

“She decided she wanted a cool, starchy independent life, with ruffles of humor like window curtains.”

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Mary McCarthy libro The Group

Polly in Ch. 11
The Group (1963)

“One of the big features of living alone was that you could talk to yourself all you wanted and address imaginary audiences, running the gamut of emotion.”

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Mary McCarthy libro The Group

Origine: The Group (1963), Ch. 8

“To allude negligently to Kafka, Yeats, Proust, Stendhal, or St. John of the Cross in a tone of of-course-you-know-them is canonical for Mademoiselle contributors, whatever the topic in hand.”

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"Up the Ladder from Charm to Vogue", p. 186
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

“For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved in a tornado.”

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"My Confession", pp. 76–77
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

“Life for the European is a career; for the American, it is a hazard.”

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"America the Beautiful: The Humanist in the Bathtub", p. 17
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

“We are a nation of twenty million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.”

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"America the Beautiful: The Humanist in the Bathtub", p. 13
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

“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.”

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Mary McCarthy libro Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

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

“The Venetians invented the income tax, statistical science, the floating of government stock, state censorship of books, anonymous denunciations (the Bocca del Leone), the gambling casino, and the Ghetto.”

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Origine: Venice Observed (1956), Ch. 7

“The Florentines, who were incapable of ruling themselves, produced a great theorist of government: Machiavelli. The Venetians had no theorists and evolved a model Republic.”

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Origine: Venice Observed (1956), Ch. 6

“Sophistication, that modern kind of sophistication that begs to differ, to be paradoxical, to invert, is not a possible attitude in Venice. In time, this becomes the beauty of the place. One gives up the struggle and submits to a classic experience. One accepts the fact that what one is about to feel or say has not only been said before by Goethe or Musset but is on the tip of the tongue of the tourist from Iowa who is alighting in the Piazzetta with his wife in her furpiece and jeweled pin. Those Others, the existential enemy, are here identical with oneself.”

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Origine: Venice Observed (1956), Ch. 1

“The rationalist mind has always had its doubts about Venice. The watery city receives a dry inspection, as though it were a myth for the credulous — poets and honeymooners.”

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Origine: Venice Observed (1956), Ch. 1

“This refusal to listen was a form of stupidity that Martha especially abhorred, and she considered Miles well punished for it. If he had ever taken seriously her passionate desire to leave him, she might not (she now believed) have been driven in practice to show him how little indeed he knew. To pay attention, for Martha, was the prime human virtue; without it, there could be no dignity and no reciprocity.”

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Mary McCarthy libro A Charmed Life

Origine: A Charmed Life (1955), Ch. 5, p. 594

“Loyalty to a side, he said, had been instilled in him by his southern mother, but he now thought you had to be loyal to all sides, to the truth as you saw it, which, when you came down to it, meant being loyal to yourself.”

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Mary McCarthy libro A Charmed Life

Warren in Ch. 2, pp. 535–536
A Charmed Life (1955)

“For all his derogation, he truly believed in the modern, as subversive of established values, a mine or fuse laid under the terrain of the virtuous; the words, modern, secular, experimental, were drawled out by him in a seductive, blandishing tone, like a veiled erotic invitation.”

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Mary McCarthy libro The Groves of Academe

Origine: The Groves of Academe (1952), Ch. VI, p. 383

“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.”

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Mary McCarthy libro The Oasis

Origine: The Oasis (1949), p. 253

“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.”

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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.

“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.”

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

“She could not bear to hurt her husband. She impressed this on the Young Man, on her confidantes, and finally on her husband himself. The thought of Telling Him actually made her heart turn over in a sudden and sickening way, she said. This was true, and yet she knew that being a potential divorcee was deeply pleasurable in somewhat the same way that being an engaged girl had been.”

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First published in The Southern Review (Spring 1939)
Origine: The Company She Keeps (1942), Ch. 1 "Cruel and Barbarous Treatment", p. 5, first lines of novel.

“Morality did not keep well; it required stable conditions; it was costly; it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain.”

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Mary McCarthy libro The Oasis

Origine: The Oasis (1949), p. 286

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