America is indeed a revelation, though not quite the one that was planned. Given a clean slate, man, it was hoped, would write the future. Instead, he has written his past.
Mary McCarthyBeing abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.
Mary McCarthyThe immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof
Mary McCarthyTo care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.
Mary McCarthy