Mary McCarthy Life Quotations

The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is the fact that we tolerate conditions that are, from a negative point of view, intolerable. What the foreigner finds most objectionable in American life is its lack of basic comfort. No nation with any sense of material well-being would endure the food we eat, the cramped apartments we live in, the noise, the traffic, the crowded subways and buses. American life, in large cities, is a perpetual assault on the senses and the nerves; it is out of asceticism, out of unworldliness, precisely, that we bear it.

The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable.

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted. Spicy court-memoirs, the lives of gallant ladies, recollections of an ex-nun, a monk's confession, an atheist's repentance, true-to-life accounts of prostitution and bastardy gave our ancestors a penny peep into the forbidden room.

The strongest argument for the unmaterialistic character of American life is . . . that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable . . . the food we eat, the cramped apartments . . . the crowded subways. . . . American life, in large cities, at any rate, is a perpetual assault of the senses and the nerves; it is out of asceticism, out of unworldliness, precisely, that we bear it.

We are the hero of our own story.

We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.