Any sizeable Portuguese town looks like a superstitious bride's finery - something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.
Mary McCarthyThe present can try to bury the past, an operation that is most atrocious when it is most successful.
Mary McCarthyIn verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?
Mary McCarthy