Mary MacLane Quotes & Sayings

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

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. — Mary MacLane

I want fame more than I can tell. But more than I want fame I want happiness. — Mary MacLane

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

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. — Mary MacLane

Nineteen years are as ages to you when you are nineteen. When you are nineteen, there is no experience to tell you that all things have an end. This aching pain has no end. — Mary MacLane

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. — Mary MacLane

I would rather be a fairly happy wife and mother. — Mary MacLane

I was born to be alone, and I always shall be; but now I want to be. — Mary MacLane

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

... some bits of Dickens-books with which latter I am long familiar and long enamored for the restful falseness of their sentiment and the pungent appetizing charm of their villains. — Mary MacLane

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

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

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

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

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

From insipid sweet wine; from men who wear moustaches; from the sort of people that call legs 'limbs'; from bedraggled white petticoats: Kind Devil, deliver me. — Mary MacLane

Fame may pass over my head; money may escape me; my one friend may fail me; every hope may fold its tent and steal away; Happiness may remain a sealed book; every remnant of human ties may vanish; I may find myself an outcast; good things held out to me may suddenly be withdrawn; the stars may go out, one by one; the sun may go dark; yet still I may hold upright my head, if I have but my steak - and my onions. — Mary MacLane

Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest. — Mary MacLane

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

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. — Mary MacLane

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. — Mary MacLane

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

The book, you understand, was not written for publication. It was the portrayal of my emotions, the analysis of my own soul life during three months of my nineteenth year. I wrote then all the time, just as I do now, but, though the book is in diary form, it is not a diary. — Mary MacLane

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

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. — Mary MacLane

I want to live quietly. — Mary MacLane

I have never read a line of Walt Whitman. — Mary MacLane

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. — Mary MacLane

It is day after day. It is week after week. It is month after month. It is year after year. It is only time going and going. There is no joy. There is no lightness of heart. It is only the passing of days. I am young and alone. — Mary MacLane

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

When I think of the exquisite love and sympathy which might be between a mother and daughter, I feel myself defrauded of a beautiful thing rightfully mine, in a world where for me such things are pitiably few. — Mary MacLane

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. — Mary MacLane

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. — Mary MacLane

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. — Mary MacLane

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

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. — Mary MacLane

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. — Mary MacLane

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. — Mary MacLane

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

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. — Mary MacLane

There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong. — Mary MacLane

And is it worth while to remain true to an ideal that offers only the vaguest hopes of realization? It is not philosophy. When one has made up one's mind that one wants a dish of hot stewed mushrooms, and set one's heart on it, should one scorn a handful of raw evaporated apples, if one were starving, for the sake of the phantom dish of hot stewed mushrooms? Should one say, Let me starve, but I will never descend to evaporated apples; I will have nothing but a dish of hot stewed mushrooms? If one is sure one will have the stewed mushrooms finally, before one dies of starvation, then very well. One should wait for them and take nothing else. — Mary MacLane

An idle brain is the Devil's workshop, they say. It is an absurdly incongruous statement. If the Devil is at work in a brain it certainly is not idle. And when one considers how brilliant a personage the Devil is, and what very fine work he turns out, it becomes an open question whether he would have the slightest use for most of the idle brains that cumber the earth. — Mary MacLane

Sometimes I think I am a strange, strange creature -- something not of earth, nor yet of heaven, nor of hell. I think at times I am a little thing fallen on the earth by mistake: a thing thrown among foreign, unfitting elements, where every little door is closed -- every Why unanswered, and itself knows not where to lay its head. I feel a deadly certainty in some moments that the wild world contains not one moment of rest for me, that there will never be any rest, that my woman's-soul will go on asking long, long centuries after my woman's-body is laid in its grave. — Mary MacLane

I fail remarkably. I write Eye when I mean Tooth. I write Fornicate when I mean Caress. I write Wine when I mean Blood. — Mary MacLane

This article is going to be very egotistical and MacLanesque and maybe somewhat shocking besides, so I strongly advise divers citizens of Butte not to read it. It occurs to me that some of the things I write do not agree with the constitutions of the said citizens - it seems to be bad for their livers - hence this preliminary note of warning. So now if you go right on and read it and it affects your liver unpleasantly, don't blame me. — Mary MacLane

As I stand among the barren gulches in these days and look away at the slow-awakening hills of Montana, I hear the high, swelling, half tired, half-hopeful song of the world. As I listen I know that there are things, other than the Virtue and the Truth and the Love, that are not for me. There is beyond me, like these, the unbreaking, undying bond of human fellowship - a thing that is earth-old. — Mary MacLane

I live an immoral life. It is immoral because it is deadly futile. — Mary MacLane

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. — Mary MacLane

I shall have to miss forever some beautiful, wonderful things because of that wretched, lonely childhood. There will always be a lacking, a wanting -- some dead branches that never grew leaves. It is not deaths and murders and plots and wars that make life tragedy. It is day after day, and year after year, and Nothing. It is a sunburned little hand reached out and Nothing put into it. — Mary MacLane

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

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

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. — Mary MacLane

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. — Mary MacLane

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. — Mary MacLane

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

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

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. There are too many such in the world now. — Mary MacLane

I Don't Know whether lust is a human coarseness or a human fineness: I don't know why death holds a so sweet lure since it would take away my Body: I don't know that I wouldn't deny my Christ, if I had one, three times before a given cockcrow: I don't know on the other hand that I would: I don't know whether honor is a reality in human beings or a pose: I don't know that I mayn't be able to think with my Body when it is in its coffin. — Mary MacLane

The only joy I had was writing what was. That book was. It no longer amuses me to be all the things I was when I wrote that. But it is my story as I was then. — Mary MacLane

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

Surely there must be in a world of manifold beautiful things something among them for me. And always, while I am still young, there is that dim light, the Future. But it is indeed a dim, dim light, and ofttimes there's a treachery in it. — Mary MacLane

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. — Mary MacLane

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. — Mary MacLane

It is to be hoped you are not 'intellectual,' which is an unpardonable trait — Mary MacLane

... the neurotic torture of being seductive regularly - by the night: the more that perchance the struggle always is unconscious. — Mary MacLane

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

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

If it please the Devil, one day I may have happiness. That will be all-sufficient. I shall then analyze no more. I shall be a different being.

But meanwhile I shall eat. — Mary MacLane

It is of the dubious inevitable side of human nature - like gold teeth and tinned salmon and bastard lacy valentines — Mary MacLane

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

But no matter how ferociously pitiable is the dried up graveyard, the sand and barrenness and the sluggish little stream have their own persistent individual damnation. The world is at least so constructed that its treasures may be damned each in a different manner and degree. — Mary MacLane

I do not see any beauty in self-restraint. — Mary MacLane