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When we pass from "I ought to do this" to "You think I ought to do this," it seems to us at first that we have weakened the imperative; actually, by externalizing it, we have made it unanswerable, for it is only ourselves that we can come to terms with.

— Mary McCarthy The Company She Keeps (1942)

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Source: Ch. 5 "Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man", pp. 147–148
Work: The Company She Keeps, 1942
Source quality: Precise citation Points to a specific work with a page, chapter, date or similar locator, so you can look it up.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Mary McCarthy (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.