Mary MacLane Quotes

When I was three years old I was taken with my family to a little town in Western Minnesota, where I lived a more or less vapid and ordinary life until I was ten.

I do not see any beauty in self-restraint.

The world is like a little marsh filled with mint and white hawthorn.

Fame is indeed beautiful and benign and gentle and satisfying, but happiness is something at once tender and brilliant beyond all things.

I am lithe, but fragile from constant involuntary self-analysis.

I read of the Kalamazoo girl who killed herself after reading the book. I am not at all surprised. She lived in Kalamazoo, for one thing, and then she read the book.

One must always say things that aim to interest, because in the world one must after all pay for one's keep.

I do not sing nor play, but I adore music, particularly Chopin. I like him because I cannot understand him.

A genius who does not know that he is a genius is no genius.

Genius of a kind has always been with me; an empty heart that has taken on a certain wooden quality; an excellent, strong woman's body and a pitiably starved soul.

There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong.

May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity - a virtuous woman.

People say of me, 'She's peculiar.' They do not understand me. If they did they would say so oftener and with emphasis.

I would rather be a fairly happy wife and mother.

I want fame more than I can tell. But more than I want fame I want happiness.

I am a genius. Then it amused me to keep saying so, but now it does not. I expected to be happy sometime. Now I know I shall never be.

I have never read a line of Walt Whitman.

I've never made plans for more than a day ahead.

Let me but make a beginning, let me but strike the world in a vulnerable spot, and I can take it by storm.

Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest.

When I wrote my book I wanted to love someone. I wanted to be in love. Now I know that I shall never be in love - and I no longer wish to be.

Some people say that beauty is a curse. It may be true, but I'm sure I should not have at all minded being cursed a little.

Some day the Devil will come to me and say: 'Come with me.'And I will answer: 'Yes.

Do you think a man is the only creature with whom one may fall in love?

Are there many things in this cool-hearted world so utterly exquisite as the pure love of one woman for another woman?

Genius, apart from natural sensitiveness, is prone equally to unreasoning joy and to bitterest morbidness.

I began to be a woman at twelve, or more properly, a genius.

However great one's gift of language may be, there is always something that one cannot tell.

I was born to be alone, and I always shall be but now I want to be.

I have read of women who have been strongly, grandly brave. Sometimes I have dreamed that I might be brave. The possibilities of this life are magnificent.

The highest thing one can do in literature is to succeed in saying that thing which one meant to say. There is nothing better than that - to make the world see your thoughts as you see them.

I want to live quietly.

I consider calmly the question of how much evil I should need to kill off my finer feelings.

It is with pain that I read of the dire effects of my book upon the minds of young girls.

at this point I meet Me face to face. I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world and dearly and damnably important to Me.

Well, if I am not vulgar, neither is my book. I wrote myself. Suggestiveness is always vulgar. But truth never. My book is not even remotely suggestive. I call things by their names. That is all.

The art of Good Eating has two essential points: one must eat only when one is hungry, and one must take small bites.

I write every day. Writing is a necessity - like eating.

But in my life, in my personality, there is an essence of falseness and insincerity. A thin, fine vapor of fraud hangs always over me and dampens and injures some things in me that I value.

May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity— a virtuous woman. Anything, Devil, but that.

It is the trivial little facts about anything that describe it the most effectively.

I am a selfish, conceited, impudent little animal, it is true, but, after all, I am only one grand conglomeration of Wanting…