Marya Mannes

21 quotes

Biography

Marya Mannes was a 20th-century American writer and critic, known for her caustic but insightful observations of American life. Mannes also wrote under the pen name of "Sec."

"For every five well-adjusted and smoothly functioning Americans, there are two who never had the chance to discover themselves. It may well be because they have never been alone with themselves."

Marya Mannes

"In aid, the proper attitude is one omitting gratitude."

Marya Mannes

"It is not enough to show people how to live better: there is a mandate for any group with enormous powers of communication to show people how to be better."

Marya Mannes

"The curse of the romantic is a greed for dreams, an intensity of expectation that, in the end, diminishes the reality."

Marya Mannes

"The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future."

Marya Mannes

"All really great lovers are articulate, and verbal seduction is the surest road to actual seduction."

Marya Mannes

"In our society those who are in reality superior in intelligence can be accepted by their fellows only if they pretend they are not."

Marya Mannes

"If American men are obsessed with money, American women are obsessed with weight. The men talk of gain, the women talk of loss, and I do not know which talk is the more boring."

Marya Mannes

"The curse of the romantic is a greed for dreams, an intensity of expectation that, in the end, diminishes the reality."

Marya Mannes

"Women are repeatedly accused of taking things personally. I cannot see any other honest way of taking them."

Marya Mannes

"Borders are scratched across the hearts of men, by strangers with a calm, judicial pen, and when the borders bleed we watch with dread the lines of ink along the map turn red."

Marya Mannes

"One is as one is and the love that can't encompass both is a poor sort of love."

Marya Mannes

"Is there no end to this escalation of desire?"

Marya Mannes

"It's never what you say, but how you make it sound sincere."

Marya Mannes

"The sign of an intelligent people is their ability to control their emotions by the application of reason."

Marya Mannes

"It's never what you say but how you make it sound sincere."

Marya Mannes

"Generosity with strings is not generosity: it is a deal."

Marya Mannes

"The sign of an intelligent people is their ability to control emotions by the application of reason."

Marya Mannes

"To lead means to direct and to exact and no man dares do either - he might be unpopular. What authority we are given now is a trinity: the grin the generality and God (the Word)."

Marya Mannes

"The process of maturing is an art to be learned an effort to be sustained. By the age of fifty you have made yourself what you are and if it is good it is better than your youth."

Marya Mannes

"It is privilege of living to be ... acutely agonizingly conscious of the moment that is always present and always passing."

Marya Mannes