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 am not good. I am not virtuous. I am not sympathetic. I am not generous. I am merely and above all a creature of intense passionate feeling. I feel—everything. It is my genius. It burns me like fire.

I want to write such things as compel the admiring acclamation of the world at large, such things as are written but once in years, things subtle but distinctly different from the books written every day.

I can think of nothing in the world like the utter littleness, the paltriness, the contemptibleness, the degradation, of the woman who is tied down under a roof with a man who is really nothing to her; who wears the man’s name, who bears the man’s children — who plays the virtuous woman. . . . May I never, I say, become that abnormal merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity — a virtuous woman.

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.

You may think me crude, and probably I am crude, but I am not so crude as I was, for I am clever enough to see that the girl of nineteen who thought herself a genius was only an unusual girl writing her heart out.

I never give my real self. I have a hundred sides, and I turn first one way and then the other. I am playing a deep game. I have a number of strong cards up my sleeve. I have never been myself, excepting to two friends.

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.

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

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

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

My intention to lecture is as vague as my intention is to go on the stage. I will never consider an offer to lecture, not because I despise the vocation, but because I have no desire to appear on the public rostrum.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

When a man and a woman love one another that is enough. That is marriage. A religious rite is superfluous. And if the man and woman live together without the love, no ceremony in the world can make it a marriage.

I want to live quietly.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Except two breeds - the stupid and the narrowly feline - all women have a touch of the Lesbian: an assertion all good non-analytic creatures refute with horror, but quite true: there is always the poignant intensive personal taste, the flair of inner-sex, in the tenderest friendships of women.

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

Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest.

One's thoughts are one's most crucial adventures. Seriously and strongly and intently to contemplate doing murder is everyway more exciting, more romantic, more profoundly tragic than the murder done.

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

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.

Just why I sent it to the publishers would be hard to say, but when I had finished it I felt that it was literature, because it is real and because it was well written. And I know that the world wants such things.

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.

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.

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

I have never read a line of Walt Whitman.

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

I would rather be a fairly happy wife and mother.

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.

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.

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