Mary McCarthy Quotes

“We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.”

“He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.”

“When she quieted the jet engine buzz of worries assaulting her brain, when she stopped thinking altogether and just felt, she knew this was right. Feeling the silence of peace and conviction was so foreign to her she wasn't even sure what to do with it.”

“Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?”

“Used to be a hobo right smart. back in the thirties. They wasnt no work I dont care what you could do. I was ridin through the mountains one night, state of Colorado. Dead of winter it was and bitter cold. I had just a smidgin of tobacco, bout enough for one or two smokes. I was in one of them old slatsided cars and I'd been up and down in it like a dog tryin to find some place where the wind wouldnt blow. Directly I scrunched up in a corner and rolled me a smoke and lit it and thowed the match down. Well, they was some sort of stuff in the floor about like tinder and it caught fire. I jumped up and stomped on it and it aint done nothin but burn faster. Wasnt two minutes the whole car was afire. I run to the door and got it open and we was goin up this grade through the mountains in the snow with the moon on it and it was just blue looking and dead quiet out there and them big old black pine trees going by. I jumped for it and lit in a snowbank and what I'm goin to tell you you'll think peculiar but it's the god's truth. That was in nineteen and thirty one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I dont think I'll ever see anything as pretty as that train on fire goin up that mountain and around the bend and them flames lightin up the snow and the trees and the night.”

“I jumped for it and lit in a snowbank and what I'm goin to tell you you'll think peculiar but it's the god's truth. That was in nineteen and thirty one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I dont think I'll ever see anything as pretty as that train on fire goin up that mountain and around the bend and them flames lightin up the snow and the trees and the night.”

“I knew that by this time tomorrow, I was going to be eternally grateful for falling down the stairs and knocking myself unconscious. Smartest dumbest thing I'd ever done.”

“I am in a state about all of this. I comb the newspapers. I listen to the commentators. And I get into fights all over the place. If a Republican knows his place and hates McCarthy and wishes to God Eisenhower would get more aggressive about these bastards, well and good and I will admit him to the brotherhood. If he says nasty things about Truman (who is rapidly becoming the Man I Love although I have been sore enough at him in my time) or still thinks taxes are coming down and we can get out of Korea‡ and we ought to fire all the Democrats in Washington and don’t worry, McCarthy-ism will blow over or alternately Where There’s Smoke There’s Fire—well, dear, I am no lady and I argue loudly and lose my temper and it’s disgraceful.”

“That guy in the corner. Never tells the truth, as a matter of principle. Why answer a question, he says, if you can tell a good story instead?”

“We had found nothing, and had been lost several times already in one morning, so this was shaping up into a top travel experience.”