Quote #44

Mary McCarthy was a rara avis, a rare bird: a truly sexy intellectual who was nonetheless more interested in truth than in being intellectually sexy or fashionable. ... The real beauty of her life and work is that she was an explorer who never compromised her freedom or integrity. Her writing was symptomatic of this. It never quite became an end in itself, but remained, throughout her life, a means to articulating herself as 'her own woman'. In that she succeeded marvellously and it is the way in which she did it for which she deserves lasting respect and emulation.

More from Mary McCarthy

  1. I absolutely adored Mary. I was transfixed by her. She was so beautiful, so witty, so much fun to talk to.
  2. She was a great heroine to many young women of my age. She was a heroine for her independence and her courage in speaking out in defence of…
  3. The cultural heroine of my generation... before feminist writing got bogged down in victimisation.
  4. Intellectual responses are known as opinions and Mary had them and had them. Still she was so little of an ideologue as to be sometimes uns…
  5. I see her in the image of a Valkyrie maiden, riding her steed into the circle, amid thunder and lightning, and out again, bearing the body …
  6. We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.
  7. The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the bother of talk after dinner.
  8. People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.

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