Mary McCarthy Quotes

Without a musket to raise, a barricade to storm, a flag to wave, the question hit me in the face like the cold air: 'Who am I?'

My music is the spiritual expression of what I am - my faith, my knowledge, my being.

The Martyr finds her way to self-knowledge through pain, suffering, and surrender.

You don't go through a deep personal transformation without some kind of dark night of the soul.

And it is in this darkness, when there is nothing left in us that can please or comfort our own minds, when we seem to be useless and worthy of all contempt, when we seem to have failed, when we seem to be destroyed and devoured, it is then that the deep and secret selfishness that is too close to us for us to identify is stripped away from our souls. It is in this darkness that we find liberty. It is in this abandonment that we are made strong. This is the night which empties us and makes us pure.

We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing.

Come to the Root of the Root of your Self

Sometimes when we awaken from the bad dream of disowning ourselves, we think that the sojourn to self-discovery is a new one. But it is an ancient quest.

Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self.

If you are on an honest journey to find yourself, you'll find God.

Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.

It is a true miracle when a man finally sees himself as his only opposition.

When you forget everything, there only remains yourself - and that is not enough.

I believe that is what the God experience does for us. It calls us beyond our limits into the fullness of life - into a capacity to love people we are not taught to love - and into an ability to be who we are.

You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I'm someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

It's something that I had been pushing down my whole life. The search for meaning, I guess, the whispering of the soul.

Re-examine all that you have been told... dismiss that which insults your soul.

'Kaafir' has come along because I have never been more aligned with my truth.

It's a lot harder to write a story that's compelling about identity and sense of self without some villain in the room.

You've got to find yourself first. Everything else'll follow.

He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.

I am not a communist first and an individualist second. I am an individualist first, and I don't mean this in the shallow, purely egotistical sense of self-interest and everyone else be damned. I mean this in the true sense of enlightenment, recovery of personality, and the full development of personality.

Hiddenness is the place of purification. In hiddenness we find our true selves.

Life is finding yourself. It is a spirit development.